Holistic security reviews should reveal far more than simple bugs. Often, these bugs indicate deeper issues that can be challenging to understand and address. Given the time-boxed nature of reviews, security engineers may not have the opportunity to identify all bugs caused by these problems—and they may continue to […]

In March, I joined the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s Technology Advisory Committee (TAC), helping the regulatory agency navigate the complexities of cybersecurity risks, particularly in emerging technologies like AI and blockchain. During the committee’s first meeting, I discussed how the rapidly changing and public nature of blockchain technology makes it uniquely susceptible […]

On March 28, 2023, SafeMoon, a self-styled “community-focused DeFi token” on Binance Smart Chain, lost the equivalent of $8.9 million in Binance Coin BNB to an exploit in a liquidity pool. The exploit leveraged a simple error introduced in an upgrade to SafeMoon’s SFM token contract, allowing the attacker to burn tokens held in the […]

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) has circulated an Artificial Intelligence (AI) Accountability Policy Request for Comment on what policies can support the development of AI audits, assessments, certifications, and other mechanisms to create earned trust in AI systems. Trail of Bits has submitted a response to the […]

Intermediate languages (IRs) are what reverse engineers and vulnerability researchers use to see the forest for the trees. IRs are used to view programs at different abstraction layers, so that analysis can understand both low-level code aberrations and higher levels of flawed logic mistakes. The setback is that bug-finding tools are often pigeonholed into choosing […]

Read the official announcement on the PyPI blog as well! For the past year, we’ve worked with the Python Package Index to add a new, more secure authentication method called “trusted publishing.” Trusted publishing eliminates the need for long-lived API tokens and passwords, reducing the risk of supply chain attacks and credential leaks while also […]

Last month, hundreds of cryptographers descended upon Tokyo for the first Real World Crypto Conference in Asia. As in previous years, we dispatched a handful of our researchers and engineers to present and attend the conference. What sets RWC apart from other conferences is that it strongly emphasizes research, collaborations, and advancements in cryptography that […]

WNF (Windows Notification Facility) is an undocumented notification mechanism that allows communication inside processes, between processes, or between user mode processes and kernel drivers. Similar to other notification mechanisms like ETW (Event Tracing for Windows) and ALPC (Advanced Local Procedure Call), WNF communication happens over different “channels,” each representing […]

Last September, Principal Security Engineer Dr. Evan Sultanik was on a panel hosted by the Naval Postgraduate School’s Distributed Consensus: Blockchain & Beyond (DC:BB) movement, where faculty and students there are seeking opportunities to learn and share knowledge, research, funding, and events focused on distributed consensus technologies. The panel of nine government, academia, and industry […]

During a security audit, I discovered an easy-to-miss typo that unintentionally failed to enable _FORTIFY_SOURCE, which helps detect memory corruption bugs in incorrectly used C functions. We searched, found, and fixed twenty C and C++ bugs on GitHub with this same pattern. Here is a list of some of them related […]

As a winter associate at Trail of Bits, my goal was to make two improvements to the GNU Project Debugger (GDB): make it run faster and improve its Python API to support and improve tools that rely on it, like Pwndbg. The main goal was to run […]

The aCropalypse is upon us! Last week, news about CVE-2023-21036, nicknamed the “aCropalypse,” spread across Twitter and other media, and I quickly realized that the underlying flaw could be detected by our tool, PolyTracker. I’ll explain how PolyTracker can detect files affected by the vulnerability even without specific file format knowledge.

Is artificial intelligence (AI) capable of powering software security audits? Over the last four months, we piloted a project called Toucan to find out. Toucan was intended to integrate OpenAI’s Codex into our Solidity auditing workflow. This experiment went far […]

TL;DR: We have released version 0.8.0 of Circomspect, our static analyzer and linter for Circom. Since our initial release of Circomspect in September 2022, we have added five new analysis passes, support for tags, tuples, and anonymous components, links to in-depth descriptions of each identified issue, and squashed a […]

Trail of Bits has launched a practice focused on machine learning and artificial intelligence, bringing together safety and security methodologies to create a new risk assessment and assurance program. This program evaluates potential bespoke risks and determines the necessary safety and security measures for AI-based systems.

As smart contract security constantly evolves, property-based fuzzing has become a go-to technique for developers and security engineers. This technique relies on the creation of code properties – often called invariants – which describe what the code is supposed to do. To help the community define properties, we are releasing a set of 168 pre-built […]

In part one of this two-part series, we escaped Webviews in real-world misconfigured VSCode extensions. But can we still escape extensions if they are well-configured? In this post, we’ll demonstrate how I bypassed a Webview’s localResourceRoots by exploiting small URL parsing differences between the browser—i.e., the Electron-created Chromium instance where VSCode and […]

TL;DR: This two-part blog series will cover how I found and disclosed three vulnerabilities in VSCode extensions and one vulnerability in VSCode itself (a security mitigation bypass assigned CVE-2022-41042 and awarded a $7,500 bounty). We will identify the underlying cause of each vulnerability and create fully working exploits to demonstrate how an […]

I discovered a logic bug in the readline dependency that partially reveals file information when parsing the file specified in the INPUTRC environment variable. This could allow attackers to move laterally on a box where sshd is running, a given user is able to login, and the user’s private key […]

In fall 2022, Trail of Bits audited cURL, a widely-used command-line utility that transfers data between a server and supports various protocols. The project coincided with a Trail of Bits maker week, which meant that we had more manpower than we usually do, allowing us to take a nonstandard approach to the […]

During my internship at Trail of Bits, I prototyped a harness that improves the testability of the eBPF verifier, simplifying the testing of eBPF programs. My eBPF harness runs in user space, independently of any locally running kernel, and thus opens the door to testing of eBPF programs across different kernel versions. […]

A new tool for Windows RPC research. Trail of Bits is releasing a new tool for exploring RPC clients and servers on Windows. RPC Investigator is a .NET application that builds on the NtApiDotNet platform for enumerating, decompiling/parsing and communicating with arbitrary RPC servers. We’ve added visualization and additional features that offer […]

Read the official announcement on the Sigstore blog as well! Trail of Bits is thrilled to announce the first stable release of sigstore-python, a client implementation of Sigstore that we’ve been developing for nearly a year! This work has been graciously funded by Google’s Open Source Security Team (GOSST), who we’ve also […]

Trail of Bits is publicly disclosing four vulnerabilities that affect wolfSSL: CVE-2022-38152, CVE-2022-38153, CVE-2022-39173, and CVE-2022-42905. The four issues, which have CVSS scores ranging from medium to critical, can all result in a denial of service (DoS). These vulnerabilities have been discovered automatically using the novel protocol fuzzer tlspuffin. This blog post […]

This time last year, we wrote about the more than 190 Trail of Bits-authored pull requests that were merged into non-Trail of Bits repositories in 2021. In 2022, we continued that trend by having more than 400 pull requests merged into non-Trail of Bits repositories! Why is this significant? While we take […]