Admit it. Every now and then someone does something, and you think: “I also had that idea!” You feel validated — a kindred spirit has had the same intuitions, the same insights, and even drawn the same conclusions. I was reminded of this feeling recently when I came across a paper describing how to use […]
Break out your guayabera, it’s time for Infiltrate. Trail of Bits has attended every Infiltrate and has been a sponsor since 2015. The majority of the company will be in attendance this year (18 people!) and we’ll be swapping shirts and swag again. We’re looking forward to catching up with the latest research presented there […]
McSema, our x86 machine code to LLVM bitcode binary translator, just got a fresh coat of paint. Last week we held a successful hackathon that produced substantial improvements to McSema’s usability, documentation, and code quality. It’s now easier than ever to use McSema to analyze and reverse-engineer binaries. Growth stage We use McSema on a […]
This blog has promoted control flow integrity (CFI) as a game changing security mitigation and encouraged its use. We wanted to take our own security advice and start securing software we use. To that end, we decided to apply CFI to facebook’s osquery, a cross-platform codebase with which we are deeply familiar. Using osquery, we […]
I recently had the privilege of giving a keynote at BSidesLisbon. I had a great time at the conference, and I’d like to thank Bruno Morisson for inviting me. If you’re into port, this is the conference for you! I recommend that anyone in the area consider attending next year. I felt there was a […]
In my first blog post, I introduced the general structure of Binary Ninja’s Low Level IL (LLIL), as well as how to traverse and manipulate it with the Python API. Now, we’ll do something a little more interesting. Reverse engineering binaries compiled from object-oriented languages can be challenging, particularly when it comes to virtual functions. […]
Hi, I’m Josh. I recently joined the team at Trail of Bits, and I’ve been an evangelist and plugin writer for the Binary Ninja reversing platform for a while now. I’ve developed plugins that make reversing easier and extended Binary Ninja’s architecture support to assist in playing the microcorruption CTF. One of my favorite features of […]
John Oliver may have written off 2016, but we’re darn proud of all that we accomplished and contributed this year. We released a slew of the security tools that help us -and you- work smarter, and promoted a few more that deserved recognition. We helped the New York City InfoSec community build a foundation for […]
We’re back with our promised second installment discussing control flow integrity. This time, we will talk about Microsoft’s implementation of control flow integrity. As a reminder, control flow integrity, or CFI, is an exploit mitigation technique that prevents bugs from turning into exploits. For a more detailed explanation, please read the first post in this […]
I think you’ll agree when I say: there’s no VPN option on the market designed with equal emphasis on security and ease of use. That changes now. Today we’re introducing Algo, a self-hosted personal VPN server designed for ease of deployment and security. Algo automatically deploys an on-demand VPN service in the cloud that is not […]
We’ve mentioned GRR before – it’s our high-speed, full-system emulator used to fuzz program binaries. We developed GRR for DARPA’s Cyber Grand Challenge (CGC), and now we’re releasing it as an open-source project! Go check it out. Fear GRR Bugs aren’t afraid of slow fuzzers, and that’s why GRR was designed with unique and innovative […]
We’re putting our money where our mouth is again. In continued support for New York’s growing infosec community we’re excited to sponsor the upcoming O’Reilly Security Conference. We expect to be an outlier there: we’re the only sponsor that offers consulting and custom engineering rather than just off-the-shelf products. We see this conference as an […]
Our previous blog posts often mentioned control flow integrity, or CFI, but we have never explained what CFI is, how to use it, or why you should care. It’s time to remedy the situation! In this blog post, we’ll explain, at a high level, what CFI is, what it does, what it doesn’t do, and […]
Last month our Cyber Reasoning System (CRS) -developed for DARPA’s Cyber Grand Challenge– audited a much larger amount of code in less time, in greater detail, and at a lower cost than a human could. Our CRS audited zlib for the Mozilla Secure Open Source (SOS) Fund. To our knowledge, this is the first instance […]
Today, Facebook announced the successful completion of our work: osquery for Windows. “Today, we’re excited to announce the availability of an osquery developer kit for Windows so security teams can build customized solutions for their Windows networks… This port of osquery to Windows gives you the ability to unify endpoint defense and participate in an […]
Between the city’s size and the wide spectrum of the security industry, it’s easy to feel lost. Where are ‘your people?’ How can you find talks that interest you? You want to spend your time meeting and networking, not researching your options. So, we put together a directory of all of the infosec gatherings, companies, and […]
If you’re studying in a degree program, and you thrive at the intersection of software development and cyber security, you should apply to our fall or winter internship programs. It’s a great way to add paid experience -and a publication- to your resume, and get a taste of what it’s like to work in a commercial […]
Finding bugs in programs is hard. Automating the process is even harder. We tackled the harder problem and produced two production-quality bug-finding systems: GRR, a high-throughput fuzzer, and PySymEmu (PSE), a binary symbolic executor with support for concrete inputs. From afar, fuzzing is a dumb, brute-force method that works surprisingly well, and symbolic execution is […]
No doubt, DARPA’s Cyber Grand Challenge (CGC) will go down in history for advancing the state of the art in a variety of fields: symbolic execution, binary translation, and dynamic instrumentation, to name a few. But there is one contribution that we believe has been overlooked so far, and that may prove to be the […]
tl;dr While the internet went crazy today, we went fact finding. Here are our notes on Pokemon Go’s permissions to your Google account. Here’s what Jay and I set out to do at around 6pm today: Find what permissions Pokemon Go is actually requesting Investigate what the permissions actually do Replicate the permissions in a test app […]
tl;dr – Tidas is now open source. Let us know if your company wants help trying it out. When Apple quietly released the Secure Enclave Crypto API in iOS 9 (kSecAttrTokenIDSecureEnclave), it allowed developers to liberate their users from the annoyance of strong passwords or OAuth. That is, if the developers could make do without […]
Gloves Goggles Checkered body suits The representation of hackers in stock media spans a narrow band of reality between the laughable and the absurd. It overshadows the fact that lots of hackers are security professionals. They may dress differently, but they serve a critical function in the economy. It’s easy to satirize the way the […]
Using Vector35’s Binary Ninja, a promising new interactive static analysis and reverse engineering platform, I wrote a script that generated “exploits” for 2,000 unique binaries in this year’s DEFCON CTF qualifying round. If you’re wondering how to remain competitive in a post-DARPA DEFCON CTF, I highly recommend you take a look at Binary Ninja.
In the year since we started this bi-monthly meetup, we’ve been thrilled by the community that it has attracted. We’ve had some excellent presentations on pragmatic security research, shared our aspirations and annoyances with our work, and made some new friends. It’s a wonderful foundation for an even better year two! To mark the group’s […]
Google’s Protocol Buffers (protobuf) is a common method of serializing data, typically found in distributed applications. Protobufs simplify the generally error-prone task of parsing binary data by letting a developer define the type of data, and letting a protobuf compiler (protoc) generate all the serialization and deserialization code automatically. Fuzzing a service expecting protobuf-encoded structures […]
