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. Before […]
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 […]
