Today, we are releasing an experimental coverage-guided fuzzer called Honeybee that records program control flow using Intel Processor Trace (IPT) technology. Previously, IPT has been scrutinized for severe underperformance due to issues with capture systems and inefficient trace analyses. My winter internship focused on working through these challenges to make […]
Many machine learning (ML) models are Python pickle files under the hood, and it makes sense. The use of pickling conserves memory, enables start-and-stop model training, and makes trained models portable (and, thereby, shareable). Pickling is easy to implement, is built into Python without requiring additional dependencies, and supports serialization of custom […]
It is a truism in modern software development that a robust continuous integration (CI) system is necessary. But many projects suffer from CI that feels brittle, frustrates developers, and actively impedes development velocity. Why is this? What can you do to avoid the common CI pitfalls? Continuous Integration Needs a Purpose CI […]
Zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs are gaining popularity, and exciting new applications for this technology are emerging, particularly in the blockchain space. So we’d like to shine a spotlight on an interesting source of implementation bugs that we’ve seen—the Fiat Shamir transformation. A ZK proof can be either interactive, where the […]
If you’re thinking of writing a paper describing an exciting novel approach to smart contract analysis and want to know what reviewers will be looking for, you’ve come to the right place. Deadlines for many big conferences (ISSTA tool papers, ASE, FSE, etc.) are approaching, as is our own Workshop on Smart Contract Analysis, so […]
Trail of Bits sponsored the recent justCTF competition, and our engineers helped craft several of the challenges, including D0cker, Go-fs, Pinata, Oracles, and 25519. In this post we’re going to cover another of our challenges, titled PDF is broken, and so is this file. It demonstrates some of the PDF file format’s idiosyncrasies in a […]
On December 3rd, Aave deployed version 2 of their codebase. While we were not hired to look at the code, we briefly reviewed it the following day. We quickly discovered a vulnerability that affected versions 1 and 2 of the live contracts and reported the issue. Within an hour of sending our analysis to Aave, […]
Zero-knowledge proofs, once a theoretical curiosity, have recently seen widespread deployment in blockchain systems such as Zcash and Monero. However, most blockchain applications of ZK proofs make proof size and performance tradeoffs that are a poor fit for other use-cases. In particular, these protocols often require an elaborate trusted setup phase and optimize for proof […]
TL;DR: We’re open-sourcing a new framework, blight, for painlessly wrapping and instrumenting C and C++ build tools. We’re already using it on our research projects, and have included a set of useful actions. You can use it today for your own measurement and instrumentation needs: Why would you ever want to wrap a build tool? […]
After writing Go for years, many of us have learned the error-checking pattern down to our bones: “Does this function return an error? Ope, better make sure it’s nil before moving on.” And that’s great! This should be our default behavior when writing Go. However, rote error checking can sometimes prevent critical thinking about what […]
TL;DR: We audited an implementation of the Diamond standard proposal for contract upgradeability and can’t recommend it in its current form—but see our recommendations and upgrade strategy guidance. We recently audited an implementation of the Diamond standard code, a new upgradeability pattern. It’s a laudable undertaking, but the Diamond proposal and implementation raise many concerns. […]
Trail of Bits has manually curated a wealth of data—years of security assessment reports—and now we’re exploring how to use this data to make the smart contract auditing process more efficient with Slither-simil. Based on accumulated knowledge embedded in previous audits, we set out to detect similar vulnerable code snippets […]
TL;DR: Can we use GPUs to get 10x performance/dollar when fuzzing embedded software in the cloud? Based on our preliminary work, we think the answer is yes! Fuzzing is a software testing technique that supplies programs with many randomized inputs in an attempt to cause unexpected behavior. It’s an important, […]
During my summer internship at Trail of Bits I worked on osquery, the massively popular open-source endpoint monitoring agent used for intrusion detection, threat hunting, operational monitoring, and many other functions. Available for Windows, macOS, Linux, and FreeBSD, osquery exposes an operating system as a high-performance relational database, […]
Iterator invalidation is a common and subtle class of C++ bugs that often leads to exploitable vulnerabilities. During my Trail of Bits internship this summer, I developed Itergator, a set of CodeQL classes and queries for analyzing and discovering iterator invalidation. Results are easily interpretable by an auditor, […]
