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 […]

Today we released Echidna, our next-generation EVM smart fuzzer at EthCC. It’s the first-ever fuzzer to target smart contracts, and has powerful features like abstract state-machine modeling and automatic minimal test case generation. We’ve been working on it for quite some time, and are thrilled to finally share it with the world. Different interfaces for […]

What a roller coaster of a year! Well, outside of our office. Inside, 2017 was excellent. We published novel research that advanced – among others – the practices of automated bug discovery, symbolic execution, and binary translation. In the process, we improved many foundational tools that an increasing number of security researchers will come to […]

We’re helping Parity Technologies secure their Ethereum client. We’ll begin by auditing their codebase, and look forward to publishing results and the knowledge we gained in the future. Parity Technologies combines cryptography, cellular systems, peer-to-peer technology and decentralized consensus to solve the problems that have gone unaddressed by conventional server-client architecture. Their Ethereum client is designed for […]

In the past few weeks the details of two critical design flaws in modern processors were finally revealed to the public. Much has been written about the impact of Meltdown and Spectre, but there is scant detail about what these attacks are and how they work. We are going to try our best to fix […]

Four years ago, we released McSema, our x86 to LLVM bitcode binary translator. Since then, it has stretched and flexed; we added x86-64 support, put it on a performance-focused diet, and improved its usability and documentation. McSema wasn’t the only thing improving these past years, though. At the same time, programs were increasingly adopting modern […]

On December 12, over 150 attendees learned how to write and hack secure smart contracts at the final Empire Hacking meetup of 2017. Thank you to everyone who came, to our superb speakers, and to Datadog for hosting this meetup at their office. Watch the presentations again We believe strongly that the community should share […]

You’re reading the second post in our four-part series about osquery. Read post number one for a snapshot of the tool’s current use, the reasons for its growing popularity among enterprise security teams, and how it stacks up against commercial alternatives. osquery shows considerable potential to revolutionize the endpoint monitoring market. (For example, it greatly […]

Today, we are releasing access to our maintained repository of osquery extensions. Our first extension takes advantage of the Duo Labs EFIgy API to determine if the EFI firmware on your Mac fleet is up to date. There are very few examples of publicly released osquery extensions. Very little documentation exists on the topic. This […]

If you’re building real applications with blockchain technology and are worried about security, consider this meetup essential. Join us on December 12th for a special edition of Empire Hacking focused entirely on the security of Ethereum. Why attend? Four blockchain security experts will be sharing how to write secure smart contracts, and hack them. Two […]

In the year since we ported osquery to Windows, the operating system instrumentation and endpoint monitoring agent has attracted a great deal of attention in the open-source community and beyond. In fact, it recently received the 2017 O’Reilly Defender Award for best project. Many large and leading tech firms have deployed osquery to do totally […]

Last week Zeppelin released their Ethereum CTF, Ethernaut. This CTF is a good introduction to discover how to interact with a blockchain and learn the basics of the smart contract vulnerabilities. The CTF is hosted on the ropsten blockchain, and you can receive free ethers for it. The browser developer console is used to interact […]

We’re proud to announce that Trail of Bits has joined the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA), the world’s largest open source blockchain initiative. As the first information security company to join, and currently one of the industry’s top smart contract auditors, we’re excited to contribute our unparalleled expertise to the EEA. As companies begin to re-architect […]