DeepState Now Supports Ensemble Fuzzing

Alan Cao, Francis Lewis High School, Queens, NY
We are proud to announce the integration of ensemble fuzzing into DeepState, our unit-testing framework powered by fuzzing and symbolic execution. Ensemble fuzzing allows testers to execute multiple fuzzers with varying heuristics in a single campaign, while maintaining an architecture for synchronizing generated input seeds across […]

Rewriting Functions in Compiled Binaries

Aditi Gupta, Carnegie Mellon University
As a summer intern at Trail of Bits, I’ve been working on building Fennec, a tool to automatically replace function calls in compiled binaries that’s built on top of McSema, a binary lifter developed by Trail of Bits. The Problem Let’s say you have a compiled binary, but you […]

Wrapper’s Delight

Patrick Palka, University of Illinois at Chicago
During my summer at Trail of Bits, I took full advantage of the latest C++ language features to build a new SQLite wrapper from scratch that is easy to use, lightweight, high performant, and concurrency friendly—all in under 750 lines of code.

246 Findings From our Smart Contract Audits: An Executive Summary

Alex Groce
Until now, smart contract security researchers (and developers) have been frustrated by limited information about the actual flaws that survive serious development efforts. That limitation increases the risk of making critical smart contracts vulnerable, misallocating resources for risk reduction, and missing opportunities to employ automated analysis tools. We’re changing that. Today, Trail of Bits is […]

From The Depths Of Counterfeit Smartphones

Chris Evans
In an age of online second-hand retailers, marketplace exchanges, and third-party refurb shops, it’s easier than ever to save hundreds of dollars when buying a phone. These channels provide an appealing alternative for people foregoing a retail shopping experience for a hefty discount. However, there is an additional option for those bargain hunters seeking even […]

Better Encrypted Group Chat

Trail of Bits
Broadly, an end-to-end encrypted messaging protocol is one that ensures that only the participants in a conversation, and no intermediate servers, routers, or relay systems, can read and write messages. An end-to-end encrypted group messaging protocol is one that ensures this for all participants in a conversation of three or more people. End-to-end encrypted group […]

Understanding Docker container escapes

Dominik 'disconnect3d' Czarnota
Trail of Bits recently completed a security assessment of Kubernetes, including its interaction with Docker. Felix Wilhelm’s recent tweet of a Proof of Concept (PoC) “container escape” sparked our interest, since we performed similar research and were curious how this PoC could impact Kubernetes. Quick and dirty way to get out of a privileged k8s […]

On LibraBFT’s use of broadcasts

Sam Moelius
LibraBFT is the Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus algorithm used by the recently released Libra cryptocurrency. LibraBFT is based on another BFT consensus algorithm called HotStuff. While some have noted the similarities between the two algorithms, they differ in some crucial respects. In this post we highlight one such difference: in LibraBFT, non-leaders perform broadcasts. […]

Seriously, stop using RSA

Trail of Bits
Here at Trail of Bits we review a lot of code. From major open source projects to exciting new proprietary software, we’ve seen it all. But one common denominator in all of these systems is that for some inexplicable reason people still seem to think RSA is a good cryptosystem to use. Let me save […]

Avoiding Smart Contract “Gridlock” with Slither

Rajeev Gopalakrishna
A denial-of-service (DoS) vulnerability, dubbed ‘Gridlock,’ was publicly reported on July 1st in one of Edgeware’s smart contracts deployed on Ethereum. As much as $900 million worth of Ether may have been processed by this contract. Edgeware has since acknowledged and fixed the “fatal bug.” When we heard about Gridlock, we ran Slither on the […]