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 […]
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 […]
Tl;dr: 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. If you’ve read any news over the past […]
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 […]
