2016 - The Trail of Bits Blog

We’re back with our promised second installment discussing control flow integrity. This time, we will talk about Microsoft’s implementation of control flow integrity. As a reminder, control flow integrity, or CFI, is an exploit mitigation technique that prevents bugs from turning into exploits. For a more detailed explanation, please read the first post in this […]

I think you’ll agree when I say: there’s no VPN option on the market designed with equal emphasis on security and ease of use. That changes now. Today we’re introducing Algo, a self-hosted personal VPN server designed for ease of deployment and security. Algo automatically deploys an on-demand VPN service in the cloud that is not […]

We’ve mentioned GRR before – it’s our high-speed, full-system emulator used to fuzz program binaries. We developed GRR for DARPA’s Cyber Grand Challenge (CGC), and now we’re releasing it as an open-source project! Go check it out. Fear GRR Bugs aren’t afraid of slow fuzzers, and that’s why GRR was designed with unique and innovative […]

We’re putting our money where our mouth is again. In continued support for New York’s growing infosec community we’re excited to sponsor the upcoming O’Reilly Security Conference. We expect to be an outlier there: we’re the only sponsor that offers consulting and custom engineering rather than just off-the-shelf products. We see this conference as an […]

Our previous blog posts often mentioned control flow integrity, or CFI, but we have never explained what CFI is, how to use it, or why you should care. It’s time to remedy the situation! In this blog post, we’ll explain, at a high level, what CFI is, what it does, what it doesn’t do, and […]

Last month our Cyber Reasoning System (CRS) -developed for DARPA’s Cyber Grand Challenge– audited a much larger amount of code in less time, in greater detail, and at a lower cost than a human could. Our CRS audited zlib for the Mozilla Secure Open Source (SOS) Fund. To our knowledge, this is the first instance […]

Today, Facebook announced the successful completion of our work: osquery for Windows. “Today, we’re excited to announce the availability of an osquery developer kit for Windows so security teams can build customized solutions for their Windows networks… This port of osquery to Windows gives you the ability to unify endpoint defense and participate in an […]

Between the city’s size and the wide spectrum of the security industry, it’s easy to feel lost. Where are ‘your people?’ How can you find talks that interest you? You want to spend your time meeting and networking, not researching your options. So, we put together a directory of all of the infosec gatherings, companies, and […]

If you’re studying in a degree program, and you thrive at the intersection of software development and cyber security, you should apply to our fall or winter internship programs. It’s a great way to add paid experience -and a publication- to your resume, and get a taste of what it’s like to work in a commercial […]

Finding bugs in programs is hard. Automating the process is even harder. We tackled the harder problem and produced two production-quality bug-finding systems: GRR, a high-throughput fuzzer, and PySymEmu (PSE), a binary symbolic executor with support for concrete inputs. From afar, fuzzing is a dumb, brute-force method that works surprisingly well, and symbolic execution is […]

No doubt, DARPA’s Cyber Grand Challenge (CGC) will go down in history for advancing the state of the art in a variety of fields: symbolic execution, binary translation, and dynamic instrumentation, to name a few. But there is one contribution that we believe has been overlooked so far, and that may prove to be the […]

tl;dr While the internet went crazy today, we went fact finding. Here are our notes on Pokemon Go’s permissions to your Google account. Here’s what Jay and I set out to do at around 6pm today: Find what permissions Pokemon Go is actually requesting Investigate what the permissions actually do Replicate the permissions in a test app […]

tl;dr – Tidas is now open source. Let us know if your company wants help trying it out. When Apple quietly released the Secure Enclave Crypto API in iOS 9 (kSecAttrTokenIDSecureEnclave), it allowed developers to liberate their users from the annoyance of strong passwords or OAuth. That is, if the developers could make do without […]

Gloves Goggles Checkered body suits The representation of hackers in stock media spans a narrow band of reality between the laughable and the absurd. It overshadows the fact that lots of hackers are security professionals. They may dress differently, but they serve a critical function in the economy. It’s easy to satirize the way the […]

Using Vector35’s Binary Ninja, a promising new interactive static analysis and reverse engineering platform, I wrote a script that generated “exploits” for 2,000 unique binaries in this year’s DEFCON CTF qualifying round. If you’re wondering how to remain competitive in a post-DARPA DEFCON CTF, I highly recommend you take a look at Binary Ninja.

In the year since we started this bi-monthly meetup, we’ve been thrilled by the community that it has attracted. We’ve had some excellent presentations on pragmatic security research, shared our aspirations and annoyances with our work, and made some new friends. It’s a wonderful foundation for an even better year two! To mark the group’s […]

Google’s Protocol Buffers (protobuf) is a common method of serializing data, typically found in distributed applications. Protobufs simplify the generally error-prone task of parsing binary data by letting a developer define the type of data, and letting a protobuf compiler (protoc) generate all the serialization and deserialization code automatically. Fuzzing a service expecting protobuf-encoded structures […]

If you follow the recommendations in the 2016 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR), you will expose your organization to more risk, not less. The report’s most glaring flaw is the assertion that the TLS FREAK vulnerability is among the ‘Top 10’ most exploited on the Internet. No experienced security practitioner believes that FREAK is […]

It’s time to close this chapter of our industry’s past. To distance ourselves from the World Wrestling Federation and comic book superheroes. We’re talking about hacker handles: Dildog, Thomas Dullien, Matt Blaze etc. When the Internet was young and fancy-free, hacker handles had their place. They afforded anonymity and supported the curious to explore the […]

Developers have access to tools like AddressSanitizer and Valgrind that will tell them when the code that they’re running accesses uninitialized memory, leaks memory, or uses memory after it’s been freed. Despite the availability of these excellent tools, memory bugs still persist, still get shipped to users, and still get exploited in the wild. Most […]

Earlier today, a federal judge ordered Apple to comply with the FBI’s request for technical assistance in the recovery of the San Bernadino gunmen’s iPhone 5C. Since then, many have argued whether these requests from the FBI are technically feasible given the support for strong encryption on iOS devices. Based on my initial reading of […]

For most mobile app developers, password management has as much appeal as a visit to the dentist. You do it because you have to, but it is annoying and easy to screw up, even when using standard libraries or protocols like OAUTH. Your users feel the same way. Even if they know to use strong […]

We’re excited to announce that Sophia D’Antoine will be the next featured speaker at Etsy’s Code as Craft series on Wednesday, February 10th from 6:30-8pm in NYC. What is Code as Craft? Etsy Code as Craft events are a semi-monthly series of guest speakers who explore a technical topic or computing trend, sharing both conceptual […]

Every good security researcher has a well-curated list of blogs they subscribe to. At Trail of Bits, given our interest in software security and its intersections with programming languages, one of our favorites is The Programming Language Enthusiast by Michael Hicks. Our primary activity is to describe and discuss research about — and the practical […]

At the end of last year, we had some free time to explore new and interesting uses of the automated bug-finding technology we developed for the DARPA Cyber Grand Challenge. While the rest of the competitors are quietly preparing for the CGC Final Event, we can entertain you with tales of running our bug-finding tools […]

Let’s talk about CFI: Microsoft Edition

Meet Algo, the VPN that works

Shin GRR: Make Fuzzing Fast Again

Come Find Us at O’Reilly Security

Let’s talk about CFI: clang edition

Automated Code Audit’s First Customer

Windows network security now easier with osquery

Plug into New York’s Infosec Community

Work For Us: Fall and Winter Internship Opportunities

A fuzzer and a symbolic executor walk into a cloud

Your tool works better than mine? Prove it.

Why I didn’t catch any Pokemon today

Start using the Secure Enclave Crypto API

It’s time to take ownership of our image

2000 cuts with Binary Ninja

Empire Hacking Turns One

ProtoFuzz: A Protobuf Fuzzer

The DBIR’s ‘Forest’ of Exploit Signatures

Hacker Handle Bounty

The Problem with Dynamic Program Analysis

Apple can comply with the FBI court order

Tidas: a new service for building password-less apps

Join us at Etsy’s Code as Craft

Software Security Ideas Ahead of Their Time

Hacking for Charity: Automated Bug-finding in LibOTR