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 […]
If you follow the recommendations in the 2016 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR), you will expose your organization to more risk, not less. The report’s most glaring flaw is the assertion that the TLS FREAK vulnerability is among the ‘Top 10’ most exploited on the Internet. No experienced security practitioner believes that FREAK is […]
It’s time to close this chapter of our industry’s past. To distance ourselves from the World Wrestling Federation and comic book superheroes. We’re talking about hacker handles: Dildog, Thomas Dullien, Matt Blaze etc. When the Internet was young and fancy-free, hacker handles had their place. They afforded anonymity and supported the curious to explore the […]
Developers have access to tools like AddressSanitizer and Valgrind that will tell them when the code that they’re running accesses uninitialized memory, leaks memory, or uses memory after it’s been freed. Despite the availability of these excellent tools, memory bugs still persist, still get shipped to users, and still get exploited in the wild. Most […]
Earlier today, a federal judge ordered Apple to comply with the FBI’s request for technical assistance in the recovery of the San Bernadino gunmen’s iPhone 5C. Since then, many have argued whether these requests from the FBI are technically feasible given the support for strong encryption on iOS devices. Based on my initial reading of […]
For most mobile app developers, password management has as much appeal as a visit to the dentist. You do it because you have to, but it is annoying and easy to screw up, even when using standard libraries or protocols like OAUTH. Your users feel the same way. Even if they know to use strong […]
We’re excited to announce that Sophia D’Antoine will be the next featured speaker at Etsy’s Code as Craft series on Wednesday, February 10th from 6:30-8pm in NYC. What is Code as Craft? Etsy Code as Craft events are a semi-monthly series of guest speakers who explore a technical topic or computing trend, sharing both conceptual […]
Every good security researcher has a well-curated list of blogs they subscribe to. At Trail of Bits, given our interest in software security and its intersections with programming languages, one of our favorites is The Programming Language Enthusiast by Michael Hicks. Our primary activity is to describe and discuss research about — and the practical […]
At the end of last year, we had some free time to explore new and interesting uses of the automated bug-finding technology we developed for the DARPA Cyber Grand Challenge. While the rest of the competitors are quietly preparing for the CGC Final Event, we can entertain you with tales of running our bug-finding tools […]
Now that the new year is upon us, we can look back and take assessment of 2015. The past year saw Trail of Bits continuing our prior work, such as automated vulnerability discovery and remediation, and branching out into new areas, like secure self-hosted video chat. We also increased our community outreach: we advocated against reactionary regulation, supported security-related non-profits, hosted a bi-monthly security meetup in NYC, and more.
We’re excited to announce our financial support for Let’s Encrypt, the open, automated and free SSL Certificate Authority (CA) that went into public beta on December 3. With so much room for improvement in the CA space, Let’s Encrypt offers a refreshing, promising vision of encrypting the web. Expensive SSL certificates are holding back Internet […]
Today, we’re releasing the source code to our self-hosted video chat platform, Tuber Time Communications (or just “Tuber”). We’ve been using Tuber for private video calls with up to 15 members of our team over the last year or two. We want you to use it, protect your privacy, and help us make it better. […]
In just a couple of weeks, tens of thousands of students and professionals from all over the world will tune in to cheer on their favorite teams in six competitions. If you’ve been following our blog for some time, you’ll know just what we’re referring to: Cyber Security Awareness Week (CSAW), the nation’s largest student-run cyber security event.
This summer I’ve had the incredible opportunity to work with Trail of Bits as a high school intern. In return, I am obligated to write a blog post about this internship. So without further ado, here it is. Starting with Fuzzing The summer kicked off with fuzzing, a technique I had heard of but had […]
This summer FireEye’s FLARE team hosted its second annual Flare-On Challenge targeting reverse engineers, malware analysts, and security professionals. In total, there were eleven challenges, each using different anti-reversing techniques and each in different formats. For example, challenges ranged from simple password crack-mes to kernel drivers to stego in images. This blogpost will highlight four […]
At REcon 2015, I demonstrated a new hardware side channel which targets co-located virtual machines in the cloud. This attack exploits the CPU’s pipeline as opposed to cache tiers which are often used in side channel attacks. When designing or looking for hardware based side channels – specifically in the cloud – I analyzed a […]
The Cyber Grand Challenge qualifying event was held on June 3rd, at exactly noon Eastern time. At that instant, our Cyber Reasoning System (CRS) was given 131 purposely built insecure programs. During the following 24 hour period, our CRS was able to identify vulnerabilities in 65 of those programs and rewrite 94 of them to […]
Never let a good incident go to waste. Today, we’re using the OPM incident as an excuse to share with you our top recommendations for shoring up the security of your Google Apps for Work account. More than 5 million companies rely on Google Apps to run their critical business functions, like email, document storage, calendaring, and […]
Vulnerabilities have been discovered in Ruby applications with the potential to affect vast swathes of the Internet and attract attackers to lucrative targets online. These vulnerabilities take advantage of features and common idioms such as serialization and deserialization of data in the YAML format. Nearly all large, tested and trusted open-source Ruby projects contain some of […]
