Finding randomness on the blockchain is hard. A classic mistake developers make when trying to acquire a random value on-chain is to use quantities like future block hashes, block difficulty, or timestamps. The problem with these schemes is that they are vulnerable to manipulation by miners. For example, suppose we are trying to run an […]

Of the nearly 200 papers on software fuzzing that have been published in the last three years, most of them—even some from high-impact conferences—are academic clamor. Fuzzing research suffers from inconsistent and subjective benchmarks, which keeps this potent field in a state of arrested development. We’d like to help explain why this has happened and […]

We came away from ETH Berlin with two overarching impressions: first, many developers were hungry for any guidance on security, and second; too few security firms were accessible. When we began taking on blockchain security engagements in 2016, there were no tools engineered for the work. Useful documentation was hard to find and hidden among […]

We’re proud to announce the release of Winchecksec, a new open-source tool that detects security features in Windows binaries. Developed to satisfy our analysis and research needs, Winchecksec aims to surpass current open-source security feature detection tools in depth, accuracy, and performance without sacrificing simplicity. Feature detection, made simple Winchecksec takes a Windows PE binary […]

Today, we’re going to talk about a hard problem that we are working on as part of DARPA’s Cyber Fault-Tolerant Attack Recovery (CFAR) program: automatically protecting software from 0-day exploits, memory corruption, and many currently undiscovered bugs. You might be thinking: “Why bother? Can’t I just compile my code with exploit mitigations like stack guard, […]

Most smart contracts have no verified source code, but people still trust them to protect their cryptocurrency. What’s more, several large custodial smart contracts have had security incidents. The security of contracts that exist on the blockchain should be independently ascertainable. Ethereum VM (EVM) Bytecode Ethereum contracts are compiled to EVM – the Ethereum Virtual […]

A popular trend in smart contract design is to promote the development of upgradable contracts. At Trail of Bits, we have reviewed many upgradable contracts and believe that this trend is going in the wrong direction. Existing techniques to upgrade contracts have flaws, increase the complexity of the contract significantly, and ultimately introduce bugs. To […]

Access Control Lists (ACLs) are an integral part of the Microsoft Windows security model. In addition to controlling access to secured resources, they are also used in sandboxing, event auditing, and specifying mandatory integrity levels. They are also exceedingly painful to programmatically manipulate, especially in Rust. Today, help has arrived — we released windows-acl, a […]

An increasing number of organizations and companies (including the federal government) rely on open-source projects in their security operations architecture, secure development tools, and beyond. Open-source solutions offer numerous advantages to development-savvy teams ready to take ownership of their security challenges. Teams can implement them to provide foundational capabilities, like “process logs” or “access machine […]

This spring and summer, as an intern at Trail of Bits, I researched modeling fault attacks on RSA signatures. I looked at an optimization of RSA signing that uses the Chinese Remainder Theorem (CRT) and induced calculation faults that reveal private keys. I analyzed fault attacks at a low level rather than in […]

A serious bluetooth bug has received quite a bit of attention lately. It’s a great find by Biham and Newman. Given BLE’s popularity in the patch-averse IoT world, the bug has serious implications. And yet, it’s remarkably clean and simple. Unlike many elliptic curve bugs, an average human can totally understand the bug and how […]

Tim Alberdingk Thijm As part of my Springternship at Trail of Bits, I created a series of data-flow-based optimizations that eliminate most “dead” stores that emulate writes to machine code registers in McSema-lifted programs. For example, applying my dead-store-elimination (DSE) passes to Apache httpd eliminated 117,059 stores, or 50% of the store operations to Remill’s […]

We have a soft spot in our hearts for SummerCon. This event, the longest-running hacker conference in the US, is a great chance to host hacker friends from around the world in NYC, catch up in person, and learn about delightfully weird security topics. It draws a great crowd, ranging from “hackers to feds to […]

As great as it is, osquery could be a whole lot better. (Think write access for extensions, triggered responses upon detection, and even better performance, reliability and ease of use.) Facebook’s small osquery team can’t respond to every request for enhancement. That’s understandable. They have their hands full with managing the osquery community, reviewing PRs, […]

Sometimes a conference just gets it right. Good talks, single track, select engaged attendees, and no sales talks. It’s a recipe for success that Kolide got right on its very first try with QueryCon, the first-ever osquery conference. It’s no secret that we are huge fans of osquery, Facebook’s award-winning open source endpoint detection tool. […]

We’re releasing an extension for osquery that lets you manage the local firewalls of your fleet. Each of the three major operating systems provides a native firewall, capable of blocking incoming and outgoing access when configured. However, the interface for each of these three firewall systems are dissimilar and each requires different methods of configuration. […]

We’re releasing an extension for osquery that lets you manage Google Santa without the need for a separate sync server. Google Santa is an application whitelist and blacklist system for macOS ideal for deployment across managed fleets. It uses a sync server from which daemons pull rules onto managed computers. However, the sync server provides […]

We’re releasing an extension for osquery that will let you dig deeper into the NTFS filesystem. It’s one more tool for incident response and data collection. But it’s also an opportunity to dispense with forensics toolkits and commercial services that offer similar capabilities. Until now, osquery has been inadequate for performing the kind of filesystem […]

Property-based testing is a powerful technique for verifying arbitrary properties of a program via execution on a large set of inputs, typically generated stochastically. Echidna is a library and executable I’ve been working on for applying property-based testing to EVM code (particularly code written in Solidity). Echidna is a library for generating random sequences of […]

Welcome to the third post in our series about osquery. So far, we’ve described how five enterprise security teams use osquery and reviewed the issues they’ve encountered. For our third post, we focus on the future of osquery. We asked users, “What do you wish osquery could do?” The answers we received ranged from small […]

You’ve just approved a security review of your codebase. Do you: Send a copy of the repository and wait for the report, or Take the extra effort to set the project up for success? By the end of the review, the difference between these answers will lead to profoundly disparate results. In the former case, […]

Plenty of static analyzers can perform vulnerability discovery on source code, but what if you only have the binary? How can we model a vulnerability and then check a binary to see if it is vulnerable? The short answer: use Binary Ninja’s MLIL and SSA form. Together, they make it easy to build and solve a system of equations with a theorem prover that takes binaries and turns them, alchemy-like, into vulnerabilities!

Two years ago, when we began taking on blockchain security engagements, there were no tools engineered for the work. No static analyzers, fuzzers, or reverse engineering tools for Ethereum. So, we invested significant time and expertise to create what we needed, adapt what we already had, and refine the work continuously over dozens of audits. […]

This is the second half of our blog post on the Meltdown an Spectre vulnerabilities, describing Spectre Variant 1 (V1) and Spectre Variant 2 (V2). If you have not done so already, please review the first blog post for an accessible review of computer architecture fundamentals. This blog post will start by covering the technical […]

Two weeks ago, we were engaged by CTS Labs as independent consultants at our standard consulting rates to review and confirm the technical accuracy of their preliminary findings. We participated neither in their research nor in their subsequent disclosure process. Our recommendation to CTS was to disclose the vulnerabilities through a CERT. Our review of […]