Finding randomness on the blockchain is hard. A classic mistake developers make when trying to acquire a random value on-chain is to use quantities like future block hashes, block difficulty, or timestamps. The problem with these schemes is that they are vulnerable to manipulation by miners. For example, suppose we are trying to run an […]
Of the nearly 200 papers on software fuzzing that have been published in the last three years, most of them—even some from high-impact conferences—are academic clamor. Fuzzing research suffers from inconsistent and subjective benchmarks, which keeps this potent field in a state of arrested development. We’d like to help explain why this has happened and […]
We came away from ETH Berlin with two overarching impressions: first, many developers were hungry for any guidance on security, and second; too few security firms were accessible. When we began taking on blockchain security engagements in 2016, there were no tools engineered for the work. Useful documentation was hard to find and hidden among […]
We’re proud to announce the release of Winchecksec, a new open-source tool that detects security features in Windows binaries. Developed to satisfy our analysis and research needs, Winchecksec aims to surpass current open-source security feature detection tools in depth, accuracy, and performance without sacrificing simplicity. Feature detection, made simple Winchecksec takes a Windows PE binary […]
Today, we’re going to talk about a hard problem that we are working on as part of DARPA’s Cyber Fault-Tolerant Attack Recovery (CFAR) program: automatically protecting software from 0-day exploits, memory corruption, and many currently undiscovered bugs. You might be thinking: “Why bother? Can’t I just compile my code with exploit mitigations like stack guard, […]
Most smart contracts have no verified source code, but people still trust them to protect their cryptocurrency. What’s more, several large custodial smart contracts have had security incidents. The security of contracts that exist on the blockchain should be independently ascertainable. Ethereum VM (EVM) Bytecode Ethereum contracts are compiled to EVM – the Ethereum Virtual […]
A popular trend in smart contract design is to promote the development of upgradable contracts. At Trail of Bits, we have reviewed many upgradable contracts and believe that this trend is going in the wrong direction. Existing techniques to upgrade contracts have flaws, increase the complexity of the contract significantly, and ultimately introduce bugs. To […]
Access Control Lists (ACLs) are an integral part of the Microsoft Windows security model. In addition to controlling access to secured resources, they are also used in sandboxing, event auditing, and specifying mandatory integrity levels. They are also exceedingly painful to programmatically manipulate, especially in Rust. Today, help has arrived — we released windows-acl, a […]
An increasing number of organizations and companies (including the federal government) rely on open-source projects in their security operations architecture, secure development tools, and beyond. Open-source solutions offer numerous advantages to development-savvy teams ready to take ownership of their security challenges. Teams can implement them to provide foundational capabilities, like “process logs” or “access machine […]
This spring and summer, as an intern at Trail of Bits, I researched modeling fault attacks on RSA signatures. I looked at an optimization of RSA signing that uses the Chinese Remainder Theorem (CRT) and induced calculation faults that reveal private keys. I analyzed fault attacks at a low level rather than in […]
A serious bluetooth bug has received quite a bit of attention lately. It’s a great find by Biham and Newman. Given BLE’s popularity in the patch-averse IoT world, the bug has serious implications. And yet, it’s remarkably clean and simple. Unlike many elliptic curve bugs, an average human can totally understand the bug and how […]
Tim Alberdingk Thijm As part of my Springternship at Trail of Bits, I created a series of data-flow-based optimizations that eliminate most “dead” stores that emulate writes to machine code registers in McSema-lifted programs. For example, applying my dead-store-elimination (DSE) passes to Apache httpd eliminated 117,059 stores, or 50% of the store operations to Remill’s […]
We have a soft spot in our hearts for SummerCon. This event, the longest-running hacker conference in the US, is a great chance to host hacker friends from around the world in NYC, catch up in person, and learn about delightfully weird security topics. It draws a great crowd, ranging from “hackers to feds to […]
As great as it is, osquery could be a whole lot better. (Think write access for extensions, triggered responses upon detection, and even better performance, reliability and ease of use.) Facebook’s small osquery team can’t respond to every request for enhancement. That’s understandable. They have their hands full with managing the osquery community, reviewing PRs, […]
Sometimes a conference just gets it right. Good talks, single track, select engaged attendees, and no sales talks. It’s a recipe for success that Kolide got right on its very first try with QueryCon, the first-ever osquery conference. It’s no secret that we are huge fans of osquery, Facebook’s award-winning open source endpoint detection tool. […]
