Fuzzing Like It’s 1989With 2019 a day away, let’s reflect on the past to see how we can improve. Yes, let’s take a long look back 30 years and reflect on the original fuzzing paper, An Empirical Study of the Reliability of UNIX Utilities, and its 1995 follow-up, Fuzz Revisited, by Barton P. Miller. In this blog post, […]
$10,000 research fellowships for underrepresented talentThe Trail of Bits SummerCon Fellowship program is now accepting applications from emerging security researchers with excellent project ideas. Fellows will explore their research topics with our guidance and then present their findings at SummerCon 2019. We will be reserving at least 50% of our funding for marginalized, female-identifying, transgender, and non-binary candidates. If you’re […]
CSAW CTF Crypto Challenge: Breaking DSAThe Trail of Bits cryptographic services team contributed two cryptography CTF challenges to the recent CSAW CTF. Today we’re going to cover the easier one, titled “Disastrous Security Apparatus – Good luck, ‘k?” This problem involves the Digital Signature Algorithm (DSA) and the way an apparently secure algorithm can be made entirely insecure through surprising […]
10 Rules for the Secure Use of Cryptocurrency Hardware WalletsEarlier this year, the Web3 Foundation (W3F) commissioned Trail of Bits for a security review and assessment of the risks in storing cryptocurrency. Everyone who owns cryptocurrency — from large institutions to individual enthusiasts — shares the W3F’s concerns. In service to the broader community, the W3F encouraged us to publish our recommendations for the […]
Return of the Blockchain Security Empire HackingRemember last December’s Empire Hacking? The one where we dedicated the event to sharing the best information about blockchain and smart contract security? Let’s do that again, and let’s make it a tradition; a half-day mini conference focused exclusively on a single topic every December. On December 12, please join us at Buzzfeed’s NYC offices […]
Trail of Bits @ Devcon IV RecapWe wanted to make up for missing the first three Devcons, so we participated in this year’s event through a number of talks, a panel, and two trainings. For those of you who couldn’t join us, we’ve summarized our contributions below. We hope to see you there next year. Using Manticore and Symbolic Execution to […]
We crypto nowBuilding and using cryptographic libraries is notoriously difficult. Even when each component of the system has been implemented correctly (quite difficult to do), improperly combining these pieces can lead to disastrous results. Cryptography, when rolled right, forms the bedrock of any secure application. By combining cutting-edge mathematics and disciplined software engineering, modern crypto-systems guarantee data and communication privacy.
How contract migration worksSmart contracts can be compromised: they can have bugs, the owner’s wallet can be stolen, or they can be trapped due to an incorrect setting. If you develop a smart contract for your business, you must be prepared to react to events such as these. In many cases, the only available solution is to deploy […]
The Good, the Bad, and the WeirdLet’s automatically identify weird machines in software. Combating software exploitation has been a cat-and-mouse game ever since the Morris worm in 1988. Attackers use specific exploitation primitives to achieve unintended code execution. Major software vendors introduce exploit mitigation to break those primitives. Back and forth, back and forth. The mitigations have certainly raised the bar […]
A Guide to Post-Quantum CryptographyFor many high-assurance applications such as TLS traffic, medical databases, and blockchains, forward secrecy is absolutely essential. It is not sufficient to prevent an attacker from immediately decrypting sensitive information. Here the threat model encompasses situations where the adversary may dedicate many years to the decryption of ciphertexts after their collection. One potential way forward […]
Slither – a Solidity static analysis frameworkSlither is the first open-source static analysis framework for Solidity. Slither is fast and precise; it can find real vulnerabilities in a few seconds without user intervention. It is highly customizable and provides a set of APIs to inspect and analyze Solidity code easily. We use it in all of our security reviews. Now you […]
Introduction to Verifiable Delay Functions (VDFs)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 […]
How to Spot Good Fuzzing ResearchOf 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 […]
Ethereum security guidance for allWe 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 […]
Effortless security feature detection with WinchecksecWe’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 […]
Protecting Software Against Exploitation with DARPA’s CFARToday, 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, […]
Rattle – an Ethereum EVM binary analysis frameworkMost 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 […]
Contract upgrade anti-patternsA 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 […]
Introducing windows-acl: working with ACLs in RustAccess 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 […]
Get an open-source security multiplierAn 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 […]
Fault Analysis on RSA SigningThis 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 […]
You could have invented that Bluetooth attackA 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 […]
Optimizing Lifted Bitcode with Dead Store EliminationTim 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 […]
Trail of Bits donates $100,000 to support young researchers through SummerConWe 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 […]
Announcing the Trail of Bits osquery support groupAs 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, […]
