Trent Brunson, Head of Research & Engineering Originally published on October 15, 2021 Come join our team today! Trail of Bits is hiring full-time Senior Software Engineers and Software Security Research Engineers. Over the last nine years, I’ve interviewed hundreds of applicants for research and engineering positions. One of my favorite icebreakers is, What […]
Originally published on October 12, 2021 Consensus protocols have come to play a critical role in many applications. Fischer, Lynch, and Paterson’s classic impossibility result showed that under reasonable assumptions, it can be impossible for a protocol to reach consensus. In Dwork, Lynch, and Stockmeyer’s paper “Consensus in the Presence […]
Originally published on October 6, 2021 TL;DR: Version 5.0.1 of osquery, a cross-platform, open-source endpoint visibility agent, is now available. This release is an exciting milestone for the project, as it introduces an EndpointSecurity-based process events table for macOS. Read on to learn how we integrated EndpointSecurity into osquery […]
Originally published August 11, 2021 TL;DR: These simpler, step-by-step methods equip you to apply BPF tracing technology to real-word problems—no specialized tools or libraries required. BPF, a tracing technology in the Linux kernel for network stack tracing, has become popular recently thanks to new extensions that enable novel use-cases […]
Originally published August 3, 2021 During my Trail of Bits winternship and springternship, I had the pleasure of working with Suha Hussain and Jim Miller on PrivacyRaven, a Python-based tool for testing deep-learning frameworks against a plethora of privacy attacks. I worked on improving PrivacyRaven’s versatility by adding compatibility for services […]
Originally published May 20, 2021 This blog post introduces Dylint, a tool for loading Rust linting rules (or “lints”) from dynamic libraries. Dylint makes it easy for developers to maintain their own personal lint collections. Previously, the simplest way to write a new Rust lint was to fork Clippy, Rust’s […]
Originally published May 10, 2021 While learning how to write multithreaded code in Java or C++ can make computer science students reconsider their career choices, calling a function asynchronously in Go is just a matter of prefixing a function call with the go keyword. However, writing concurrent Go code can […]
We’re hiring for our Research + Engineering team! By Aaron Yoo, University of California, Los Angeles As an intern at Trail of Bits, I worked on Solar, a proof-of-concept static analysis framework. Solar is unique because it enables context-free interactive analysis of Solidity smart contracts. A user can direct Solar to explore program paths (e.g., […]
In the summer of 2020, we described our work fuzzing the Solidity compiler, solc. So now we’d like to revisit this project, since fuzzing campaigns tend to “saturate,” finding fewer new results over time. Did Solidity fuzzing run out of gas? Is fuzzing a high-stakes project worthwhile, especially if […]
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 […]
