A few weeks ago, we went to the 24th Financial Cryptography (FC) conference and the Workshop on Trusted Smart Contracts (WTSC), where we presented our work on smart contract bug categorization (see our executive summary) and a poster on Echidna. Although FC is not a blockchain conference, it featured several blockchain-oriented presentations this year and […]
TL;DR: Trail of Bits has developed ntfs_journal_events, a new event-based osquery table for Windows that enables real-time file change monitoring. You can use this table today to performantly monitor changes to specific files, directories, and entire patterns on your Windows endpoints. Read the schema documentation here! File monitoring for fleet security and management purposes File […]
Voatz allows voters to cast their ballots from any geographic location on supported mobile devices. Its mobile voting platform is under increasing public scrutiny for security vulnerabilities that could potentially invalidate an election. The issues are serious enough to attract inquiries from the Department of Homeland Security and Congress. However, there has been no comprehensive […]
The Ethereum Name Service (ENS) contract recently suffered from a critical bug that prompted a security advisory and a migration to a new contract (CVE-2020-5232). ENS allows users to associate online resources with human-readable names. As you might expect, it allows you to transfer and sell domain names. Specific details about the bug were in […]
With the release of Manticore 0.3.3, we’re proud to announce support for symbolically executing WebAssembly (WASM) binaries. WASM is a newly standardized programming language that allows web developers to run code with near-native performance directly within the browser. Manticore 0.3.3 can explore all reachable states in a WASM program, and derive the concrete inputs that […]
Over 642 brilliant cryptographic minds gathered for Real World Crypto 2020, an annual conference that brings together cryptographic researchers with developers implementing cryptography in the wild. Overall, RWC 2020 was an impressive conference that demonstrated some amazing work. Here we explore three major themes that emerged: Crypto bugs are everywhere…Whether it’s a somewhat unsurprising Bleichenbacher […]
On Tuesday, the NSA announced they had found a critical vulnerability in the certificate validation functionality on Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016/2019. This bug allows attackers to break the validation of trust in a wide variety of contexts, such as HTTPS and code signing. Concerned? Get the important details and see if you’re vulnerable […]
On Monday, October 28th at the Crypto Economics Security Conference, Trail of Bits announced a new joint offering with Prysm Group: Mainnet360. Carefully designed to produce a comprehensive assessment of the security and economic elements of blockchain software, Mainnet360 gives teams a broader perspective that will allow them to build safer and more resilient systems. […]
How quickly can we use brute force to guess a 64-bit number? The short answer is, it all depends on what resources are available. So we’re going to examine this problem starting with the most naive approach and then expand to other techniques involving parallelization. We’ll discuss parallelization at the CPU level with SIMD instructions, […]
“If privacy matters, it should matter to the phone your life is on.” So says Apple in their recent ads about Privacy on the iPhone and controlling the data you share—but many of the security features they highlight are opt-in, and users often don’t know when or how to activate them. But hey… we got […]
At Trail of Bits, we make a significant effort to stay up to date with the academic world. We frequently evaluate our work through peer-reviewed conferences, and we love to attend academic events (see our recent ICSE and Crypto recaps). However, we consistently see one recurring issue at these academic events: a lack of reliable […]
Imagine reducing the amount of code and time needed to test software, while at the same time increasing the efficacy of your tests and making your debugging tasks easier—all with minimal human effort. It seems too good to be true, but we’re going to explain how test-case reduction can do all this (and maybe more). […]
The Trail of Bits Assurance practice has received an influx of Go projects, following the success of our Kubernetes assessment this summer. As a result, we’ve been adapting for Go projects some of the security assessment techniques and tactics we’ve used with other compiled languages. We started by understanding the design of the language, identifying […]
Parsing is hard, even when a file format is well specified. But when the specification is ambiguous, it leads to unintended and strange parser and interpreter behaviors that make file formats susceptible to security vulnerabilities. What if we could automatically generate a “safe” subset of any file format, along with an associated, verified parser? That’s […]
TL;DR: x86_64 decoding is hard, and the number and variety of implementations available for it makes it uniquely suited to differential fuzzing. We’re open sourcing mishegos, a differential fuzzer for instruction decoders. You can use it to discover discrepancies in your own decoders and analysis tools! In the beginning, there was instruction decoding Decompilation and […]
