Near the end of 2022, Trail of Bits was hired by the Open Source Technology Improvement Fund (OSTIF) to perform a security assessment of the cURL file transfer command-line utility and its library, libcurl. The scope of our engagement included a code review, a threat model, and the subject of this blog […]
Have you ever wondered how a rollup and its base chain—the chain that the rollup commits state checkpoints to—communicate and interact? How can a user with funds only on the base chain interact with contracts on the rollup? In Arbitrum Nitro, one way to call a method on a contract deployed on […]
The US Army’s Program Executive Office for Intelligence, Electronic Warfare and Sensors (PEO IEW&S) recently issued a request for information (RFI) on methods to implement and automate production of an artificial intelligence bill of materials (AIBOM) as part of Project Linchpin. The RFI describes the AIBOM as a detailed […]
Our tool Circomspect is now integrated into the Sindri command-line interface (CLI)! We designed Circomspect to help developers build Circom circuits more securely, particularly given the limited tooling support available for this novel programming framework. Integrating this tool into a development environment like that provided by Sindri is a significant step toward […]
Deserializing, decoding, and processing untrusted input are telltale signs that your project would benefit from fuzzing. Yes, even Python projects. Fuzzing helps reduce bugs in high-assurance software developed in all programming languages. Fortunately for the Python ecosystem, Google has released Atheris, a coverage-guided fuzzer for both pure Python code and Python C […]
Today we are disclosing a denial-of-service vulnerability that affects the Pedersen distributed key generation (DKG) phase of a number of threshold signature scheme implementations based on the Frost, DMZ21, GG20, and GG18 protocols. The vulnerability allows a single malicious participant to surreptitiously raise the threshold required to reconstruct the shared key, which […]
AWS Nitro Enclaves are locked-down virtual machines with support for attestation. They are Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs), similar to Intel SGX, making them useful for running highly security-critical code. However, the AWS Nitro Enclaves platform lacks thorough documentation and mature tooling. So we decided to do some deep research into it […]
This post, part of a series on cryptography in the cloud, provides an overview of the cloud cryptography services offered within Amazon Web Services (AWS): when to use them, when not to use them, and important usage considerations. Stay tuned for future posts covering other cloud services. At Trail of Bits, we […]
Did you know that symbolic links (or symlinks) created through Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) can’t be followed by Windows? I recently encountered this rather frustrating issue as I’ve been using WSL for my everyday work over the last few months. No doubt others have noticed it as well, so I wanted […]
Our latest addition to the Trail of Bits Testing Handbook is a comprehensive guide to fuzzing: an essential, effective, low-effort method to find bugs in software that involves repeatedly running a program with random inputs to cause unexpected results. At Trail of Bits, we don’t just rely on standard static analysis. We tailor our approach […]
Trail of Bits is releasing BTIGhidra, a Ghidra extension that helps reverse engineers by inferring type information from binaries. The analysis is inter-procedural, propagating and resolving type constraints between functions while consuming user input to recover additional type information. This refined type information produces more idiomatic decompilation, enhancing reverse engineering comprehension. The […]
Cosmos is a platform enabling the creation of blockchains in Go (or other languages). Its reference implementation, Cosmos SDK, leverages strong fuzz testing extensively, following two approaches: smart fuzzing for low-level code, and dumb fuzzing for high-level simulation. In this blog post, we explain the differences between these approaches and show how […]
Last month, two of our engineers attended the 37th Chaos Communication Congress (37C3) in Hamburg, joining thousands of hackers who gather each year to exchange the latest research and achievements in technology and security. Unlike other tech conferences, this annual gathering focuses on the interaction of technology and society, covering such topics as politics, entertainment, […]
We recently released a new differential testing tool, called DIFFER, for finding bugs and soundness violations in transformed programs. DIFFER combines elements from differential, regression, and fuzz testing to help users find bugs in programs that have been altered by software rewriting, debloating, and hardening tools. We used DIFFER to evaluate 10 […]
Creating reproducible builds for SGX enclaves used in privacy-oriented deployments is a difficult task that lacks a convenient and robust solution. We describe using Nix to achieve reproducible and transparent enclave builds so that anyone can audit whether the enclave is running the source code it claims, thereby enhancing the security of […]
