For the past eight months, Trail of Bits has worked with the Python Cryptographic Authority to build cryptography-x509-verification, a brand-new, pure-Rust implementation of the X.509 path validation algorithm that TLS and other encryption and authentication protocols are built on. Our implementation is fast, standards-conforming, and memory-safe, giving the Python ecosystem a modern […]
At Trail of Bits, we pride ourselves on making our best tools open source, such as Slither, PolyTracker, and RPC Investigator. But while this post is about open source, it’s not about our tools… In 2023, our employees submitted over 450 pull requests (PRs) that were merged into non-Trail of Bits repositories. This demonstrates our […]
Late last month, DARPA officially opened registration for their AI Cyber Challenge (AIxCC). As part of the festivities, DARPA also released some highly anticipated information about the competition: a request for comments (RFC) that contained a sample challenge problem and the scoring methodology. Prior rules documents and FAQs released by DARPA painted […]
We are publishing a set of 30 custom Semgrep rules for Ansible playbooks, Java/Kotlin code, shell scripts, and Docker Compose configuration files. These rules were created and used to audit for common security vulnerabilities in the listed technologies. This new release of our Semgrep rules joins our public CodeQL […]
We are disclosing LeftoverLocals: a vulnerability that allows recovery of data from GPU local memory created by another process on Apple, Qualcomm, AMD, and Imagination GPUs. LeftoverLocals impacts the security posture of GPU applications as a whole, with particular significance to LLMs and ML models run on impacted GPU […]
Trail of Bits cares about internet freedom, and one of our most valued partners in pursuit of that goal is the Open Technology Fund (OTF). Our core values involve focusing on high-impact work, including work with a positive social impact. The OTF’s Red Team Lab […]
Semgrep, a static analysis tool for finding bugs and specific code patterns in more than 30 languages, is set apart by its ease of use, many built-in rules, and the ability to easily create custom rules. We consider it an essential automated tool for discovering security issues in a […]
The Open Source Technology Improvement Fund (OSTIF) counters an often overlooked challenge in the open-source world: the same software projects that uphold today’s internet infrastructure are reliant on, in OSTIF’s words, a “surprisingly small group of people with a limited amount of time” for all development, testing, and maintenance. This scarcity of contributor time in […]
We at Trail of Bits perform security reviews for a seemingly endless stream of applications that use zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs. While fast new arithmetization and folding libraries like Halo2, Plonky2, and Boojum are rapidly gaining adoption, Circom remains a mainstay of ZK circuit design. We’ve written about Circom safety before in the […]
Behind Ethereum’s powerful blockchain technology lies a lesser-known challenge that blockchain developers face: the intricacies of writing robust Ethereum ABI (Application Binary Interface) parsers. Ethereum’s ABI is critical to the blockchain’s infrastructure, enabling seamless interactions between smart contracts and external applications. The complexity of data types and the need for precise encoding […]
AI is becoming ubiquitous, as developers of widely used tools like GitHub and Photoshop are quickly implementing and iterating on AI-enabled features. With Microsoft’s recent integration of Copilot into Windows, AI is even on the old stalwart of computing—the desktop. The integration of an AI assistant into an entire operating system is […]
We’ve updated ZKDocs with four new sections and additions to existing content. ZKDocs provides explanations, guidance, and documentation for cryptographic protocols that are otherwise sparingly discussed but are used in practice. As such, we’ve added four new sections detailing common protocols that previously lacked implementation guidance: The Inner Product Argument (IPA), which […]
I’ve created five CodeQL queries that catch potentially potent bugs in the OpenSSL libcrypto API, a widely adopted but often unforgiving API that can be misused to cause memory leaks, authentication bypasses, and other subtle cryptographic issues in implementations. These queries—which I developed during my internship with my mentors, Fredrik Dahlgren and […]
This past summer at Trail of Bits was a season of inspiration, innovation, and growth thanks to the incredible contributions of our talented interns, who took on a diverse range of technical projects under the mentorship of Trail of Bits engineers. We’d like to delve into their accomplishments, from enhancing the efficiency of fuzzing tools […]
Trusted execution environments (TEE) such as secure enclaves are becoming more popular to secure assets in the cloud. Their promise is enticing because when enclaves are properly used, even the operator of the enclave or the cloud service should not be able to access those assets. However, this leads to […]
