How to avoid the aCropalypse

Henrik Brodin
The aCropalypse is upon us! Last week, news about CVE-2023-21036, nicknamed the “aCropalypse,” spread across Twitter and other media, and I quickly realized that the underlying flaw could be detected by our tool, PolyTracker. I’ll explain how PolyTracker can detect files affected by the vulnerability even without specific […]

Circomspect has more passes!

Fredrik Dahlgren
TL;DR: We have released version 0.8.0 of Circomspect, our static analyzer and linter for Circom. Since our initial release of Circomspect in September 2022, we have added five new analysis passes, support for tags, tuples, and anonymous components, links to in-depth descriptions of each identified issue, and squashed a […]

We need a new way to measure AI security

Tl;dr: Trail of Bits has launched a practice focused on machine learning and artificial intelligence, bringing together safety and security methodologies to create a new risk assessment and assurance program. This program evaluates potential bespoke risks and determines the necessary safety and security measures for AI-based systems. If you’ve read any news over the past […]

Reusable properties for Ethereum contracts

Trail of Bits
As smart contract security constantly evolves, property-based fuzzing has become a go-to technique for developers and security engineers. This technique relies on the creation of code properties – often called invariants – which describe what the code is supposed to do. To help the community define properties, we are releasing a set of 168 pre-built […]

Escaping well-configured VSCode extensions (for profit)

Vasco Franco
In part one of this two-part series, we escaped Webviews in real-world misconfigured VSCode extensions. But can we still escape extensions if they are well-configured? In this post, we’ll demonstrate how I bypassed a Webview’s localResourceRoots by exploiting small URL parsing differences between the browser—i.e., the Electron-created Chromium instance where VSCode and […]

Escaping misconfigured VSCode extensions

Vasco Franco
TL;DR: This two-part blog series will cover how I found and disclosed three vulnerabilities in VSCode extensions and one vulnerability in VSCode itself (a security mitigation bypass assigned CVE-2022-41042 and awarded a $7,500 bounty). We will identify the underlying cause of each vulnerability and create fully working exploits to demonstrate how an […]

Readline crime: exploiting a SUID logic bug

I discovered a logic bug in the readline dependency that partially reveals file information when parsing the file specified in the INPUTRC environment variable. This could allow attackers to move laterally on a box where sshd is running, a given user is able to login, and the user’s private key […]

cURL audit: How a joke led to significant findings

Maciej Domanski
In fall 2022, Trail of Bits audited cURL, a widely-used command-line utility that transfers data between a server and supports various protocols. The project coincided with a Trail of Bits maker week, which meant that we had more manpower than we usually do, allowing us to take a nonstandard approach to the […]

Harnessing the eBPF Verifier

Laura Bauman
During my internship at Trail of Bits, I prototyped a harness that improves the testability of the eBPF verifier, simplifying the testing of eBPF programs. My eBPF harness runs in user space, independently of any locally running kernel, and thus opens the door to testing of eBPF programs across different kernel versions. […]

Introducing RPC Investigator

Aaron LeMasters
A new tool for Windows RPC research. Trail of Bits is releasing a new tool for exploring RPC clients and servers on Windows. RPC Investigator is a .NET application that builds on the NtApiDotNet platform for enumerating, decompiling/parsing and communicating with arbitrary RPC servers. We’ve added visualization and additional features that offer […]

Keeping the wolves out of wolfSSL

Trail of Bits is publicly disclosing four vulnerabilities that affect wolfSSL: CVE-2022-38152, CVE-2022-38153, CVE-2022-39173, and CVE-2022-42905. The four issues, which have CVSS scores ranging from medium to critical, can all result in a denial of service (DoS). These vulnerabilities have been discovered automatically using the novel protocol fuzzer tlspuffin. This blog post […]

Another prolific year of open-source contributions

Samuel Moelius
This time last year, we wrote about the more than 190 Trail of Bits-authored pull requests that were merged into non-Trail of Bits repositories in 2021. In 2022, we continued that trend by having more than 400 pull requests merged into non-Trail of Bits repositories! Why is this significant? While we take […]