2015 - The Trail of Bits Blog

Today, we’re releasing the source code to our self-hosted video chat platform, Tuber Time Communications (or just “Tuber”). We’ve been using Tuber for private video calls with up to 15 members of our team over the last year or two. We want you to use it, protect your privacy, and help us make it better. […]

In just a couple of weeks, tens of thousands of students and professionals from all over the world will tune in to cheer on their favorite teams in six competitions. If you’ve been following our blog for some time, you’ll know just what we’re referring to: Cyber Security Awareness Week (CSAW), the nation’s largest student-run cyber security event.

This summer I’ve had the incredible opportunity to work with Trail of Bits as a high school intern. In return, I am obligated to write a blog post about this internship. So without further ado, here it is. Starting with Fuzzing The summer kicked off with fuzzing, a technique I had heard of but had […]

This summer FireEye’s FLARE team hosted its second annual Flare-On Challenge targeting reverse engineers, malware analysts, and security professionals. In total, there were eleven challenges, each using different anti-reversing techniques and each in different formats. For example, challenges ranged from simple password crack-mes to kernel drivers to stego in images. This blogpost will highlight four […]

At REcon 2015, I demonstrated a new hardware side channel which targets co-located virtual machines in the cloud. This attack exploits the CPU’s pipeline as opposed to cache tiers which are often used in side channel attacks. When designing or looking for hardware based side channels – specifically in the cloud – I analyzed a […]

The Cyber Grand Challenge qualifying event was held on June 3rd, at exactly noon Eastern time. At that instant, our Cyber Reasoning System (CRS) was given 131 purposely built insecure programs. During the following 24 hour period, our CRS was able to identify vulnerabilities in 65 of those programs and rewrite 94 of them to […]

Never let a good incident go to waste. Today, we’re using the OPM incident as an excuse to share with you our top recommendations for shoring up the security of your Google Apps for Work account. More than 5 million companies rely on Google Apps to run their critical business functions, like email, document storage, calendaring, and […]

Vulnerabilities have been discovered in Ruby applications with the potential to affect vast swathes of the Internet and attract attackers to lucrative targets online. These vulnerabilities take advantage of features and common idioms such as serialization and deserialization of data in the YAML format. Nearly all large, tested and trusted open-source Ruby projects contain some of […]

The security research community is full of grey beards that earned their stripes writing exploits against mail servers, domain controllers, and TCP/IP stacks. These researchers started writing exploits on platforms like Solaris, IRIX, and BSDi before moving on to Windows exploitation. Now they run companies, write policy, rant on twitter, and testify in front of […]

Today we are launching Empire Hacking, a bi-monthly meetup that focuses on pragmatic security research and new discoveries in attack and defense. Empire Hacking is technical. We aim to bridge the gap between weekend projects and funded research. There won’t be any product pitches here. Come prepared with your best ideas. Empire Hacking is exclusive. […]

We need to do more to protect ourselves. 2014 overflowed with front-page proof: Apple, Target, JPMorgan Chase, etc, etc. The current, vulnerable status quo begs for radical change, an influx of talented people, and substantially better tools. As we look ahead to driving that change in 2015, we’re proud to highlight a selection of our […]