Posts

Detecting Bad OpenSSL Usage

William Wang, UCLA
OpenSSL is one of the most popular cryptographic libraries out there; even if you aren’t using C/C++, chances are your programming language’s biggest libraries use OpenSSL bindings as well. It’s also notoriously easy to mess up due to the design of its low-level API. Yet many of these mistakes fall into […]

Verifying Windows binaries, without Windows

TL;DR: We’ve open-sourced a new library, μthenticode, for verifying Authenticode signatures on Windows PE binaries without a Windows machine. We’ve also integrated it into recent builds of Winchecksec, so that you can use it today to verify signatures on your Windows executables! As a library, μthenticode aims to be a breeze to integrate: It’s written […]

Emerging Talent: Winternship 2020 Highlights

The Trail of Bits Winternship is our winter internship program where we invite 10-15 students to join us over the winter break for a short project that has a meaningful impact on information security. They work remotely with a mentor to create or improve tools that solve a single impactful problem. These paid internships give […]

Bug Hunting with Crytic

Crytic, our Github app for discovering smart contract flaws, is kind of a big deal: It detects security issues without human intervention, providing continuous assurance while you work and securing your codebase before deployment. Crytic finds many bugs no other tools can detect, including some that are not widely known. Right now, Crytic has 90+ […]

Revisiting 2000 cuts using Binary Ninja’s new decompiler

Ryan Stortz
It’s been four years since my blog post “2000 cuts with Binary Ninja.” Back then, Binary Ninja was in a private beta and the blog post response surprised its developers at Vector35. Over the past few years I’ve largely preferred to use IDA and HexRays for reversing, and then use Binary Ninja for any scripting. […]

Announcing our first virtual Empire Hacking

At Trail of Bits, we’ve all been working remotely due to COVID-19. But the next Empire Hacking event will go on, via video conference! When: April 14th @ 6PM How: RSVP via this Google Form or on Meetup. We’ll email you an invitation early next week. Come talk shop with us! Every two months, Empire […]

An Echidna for all Seasons

Gustavo Grieco
TL;DR: We have improved Echidna with tons of new features and enhancements since it was released—and there’s more to come. Two years ago, we open-sourced Echidna, our property-based smart contract fuzzer. Echidna is one of the tools we use most in smart contract assessments. According to our records, Echidna was used in about 35% of […]

Announcing the Zeek Agent

Mike Myers
(This posting is cross-posted between the Zeek blog and the Trail of Bits blog). The Zeek Network Security Monitor provides a powerful open-source platform for network traffic analysis. However, from its network vantage point, Zeek lacks access to host-level semantics, such as the process and user accounts that are responsible for any connections observed. The […]

Financial Cryptography 2020 Recap

A few weeks ago, we went to the 24th Financial Cryptography (FC) conference and the Workshop on Trusted Smart Contracts (WTSC), where we presented our work on smart contract bug categorization (see our executive summary) and a poster on Echidna. Although FC is not a blockchain conference, it featured several blockchain-oriented presentations this year and […]

Real-time file monitoring on Windows with osquery

TL;DR: Trail of Bits has developed ntfs_journal_events, a new event-based osquery table for Windows that enables real-time file change monitoring. You can use this table today to performantly monitor changes to specific files, directories, and entire patterns on your Windows endpoints. Read the schema documentation here! File monitoring for fleet security and management purposes File […]

Our Full Report on the Voatz Mobile Voting Platform

Voatz allows voters to cast their ballots from any geographic location on supported mobile devices. Its mobile voting platform is under increasing public scrutiny for security vulnerabilities that could potentially invalidate an election. The issues are serious enough to attract inquiries from the Department of Homeland Security and Congress. However, there has been no comprehensive […]

Manticore discovers the ENS bug

The Ethereum Name Service (ENS) contract recently suffered from a critical bug that prompted a security advisory and a migration to a new contract (CVE-2020-5232). ENS allows users to associate online resources with human-readable names. As you might expect, it allows you to transfer and sell domain names. Specific details about the bug were in […]

Symbolically Executing WebAssembly in Manticore

Eric Hennenfent
With the release of Manticore 0.3.3, we’re proud to announce support for symbolically executing WebAssembly (WASM) binaries. WASM is a newly standardized programming language that allows web developers to run code with near-native performance directly within the browser. Manticore 0.3.3 can explore all reachable states in a WASM program, and derive the concrete inputs that […]