Pitfalls of relying on eBPF for security monitoring (and some solutions)

Artem Dinaburg
eBPF (extended Berkeley Packet Filter) has emerged as the de facto Linux standard for security monitoring and endpoint observability. It is used by technologies such as BPFTrace, Cilium, Pixie, Sysdig, and Falco due to its low overhead and its versatility. There is, however, a dark (but open) secret: eBPF was never intended […]

Don’t overextend your Oblivious Transfer

Joop van de Pol
We found a vulnerability in a threshold signature scheme that allows an attacker to recover the signing key of threshold ECDSA implementations that are based on Oblivious Transfer (OT). A malicious participant of the threshold signing protocols could perform selective abort attacks during the OT extension subprotocol, recover the secret […]

Security flaws in an SSO plugin for Caddy

David Pokora, Maciej Domanski, Travis Peters,
We identified 10 security vulnerabilities within the caddy-security plugin for the Caddy web server that could enable a variety of high-severity attacks in web applications, including client-side code execution, OAuth replay attacks, and unauthorized access to resources. During our evaluation, Caddy was deployed as a reverse proxy […]

Secure your Apollo GraphQL server with Semgrep

Vasco Franco
tl;dr: Our publicly available Semgrep ruleset has nine new rules to detect misconfigurations of versions 3 and 4 of the Apollo GraphQL server. Try them out with semgrep –config p/trailofbits! When auditing several of our clients’ Apollo GraphQL servers, I kept finding the same issues over and over: cross-site request forgery (CSRF) […]

iVerify is now an independent company!

Dan Guido
We’re proud to announce that iVerify is now an independent company following its four-year incubation at Trail of Bits. Originally developed in-house to ensure that our personal phones, which store data essential to our work and private lives, were secured to the standards of security professionals, iVerify quickly showed that it could be valuable to […]

The Engineer’s Guide to Blockchain Finality

Benjamin Samuels
Many security-critical off-chain applications use a simple block delay to determine finality: the point at which a transaction becomes immutable in a blockchain’s ledger (and is impossible to “undo” without extreme economic cost). But this is inadequate for most networks, and can become a single point of failure for the centralized exchanges, […]

Can you pass the Rekt test?

Trail of Bits
One of the biggest challenges for blockchain developers is objectively assessing their security posture and measuring how it progresses. To address this issue, a working group of Web3 security experts, led by Trail of Bits CEO Dan Guido, met earlier this year to create a simple test for profiling the security of blockchain teams. We […]

Use our suite of eBPF libraries

Artem Dinaburg
Trail of Bits has developed a suite of open-source libraries designed to streamline the creation and deployment of eBPF applications. These libraries facilitate efficient process and network event monitoring, function tracing, kernel debug symbol parsing, and eBPF code generation. Previously, deploying portable, dependency-free eBPF applications posed significant challenges due to Linux kernel […]

A mistake in the bulletproofs paper could have led to the theft of millions of dollars

Jim Miller
We discovered a critical vulnerability in Incognito Chain that would allow an attacker to mint arbitrary tokens and drain user funds. Incognito offers confidential transactions through zero-knowledge proofs, so an attacker could have stolen millions of dollars of shielded funds without ever being detected or identified. The vulnerability stemmed from an insecure […]

How AI will affect cybersecurity: What we told the CFTC

Dan Guido
Dan Guido, CEO The second meeting of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s Technology Advisory Committee (TAC) on July 18 focused on the effects of AI on the financial sector. During the meeting, I explained that AI has the potential to fundamentally change the balance between cyber offense and defense, and that we need security-focused benchmarks […]

The future of Clang-based tooling

Peter Goodman
Clang is a marvelous compiler; it’s a compiler’s compiler! But it isn’t a toolsmith’s compiler. As a toolsmith, my ideal compiler would be an open book, allowing me to get to everywhere from anywhere. The data on which my ideal compiler would operate (files, macros, tokens), their eventual interpretation (declarations, statements, types), […]

Announcing the Trail of Bits Testing Handbook

Maciej Domanski
Trail of Bits is thrilled to announce the Testing Handbook, the shortest path for developers and security professionals to derive maximum value from the static and dynamic analysis tools we use at Trail of Bits. Why did we create the Testing Handbook? At Trail of Bits, we have spent countless hours studying, […]

Fuzzing on-chain contracts with Echidna

Elvis Skozdopolj, Guillermo Larregay
With the release of version 2.1.0 of Echidna, our fuzzing tool for Ethereum smart contracts, we’ve introduced new features for direct retrieval of on-chain data, such as contract code and storage slot values. This data can be used to fuzz deployed contracts in their on-chain state or to test […]

Trail of Bits’s Response to OSTP National Priorities for AI RFI

Heidy Khlaaf, Michael Brown
The Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) has circulated a request for information (RFI) on how best to develop policies that support the responsible development of AI while minimizing risk to rights, safety, and national security. In our response, we highlight the following points: To ensure that AI […]