2019 - The Trail of Bits Blog

Broadly, an end-to-end encrypted messaging protocol is one that ensures that only the participants in a conversation, and no intermediate servers, routers, or relay systems, can read and write messages. An end-to-end encrypted group messaging protocol is one that ensures this for all participants in a conversation of three or more people. End-to-end encrypted group […]

Note: This blog has been reposted from Truffle Suite’s blog. We are proud to announce our new smart contract security product: https://crytic.io/. Crytic provides continuous assurance for smart contracts. The platform reports build status on every commit and runs a suite of security analyses for immediate feedback. The beta will be open soon. Follow us […]

Trail of Bits recently completed a security assessment of Kubernetes, including its interaction with Docker. Felix Wilhelm’s recent tweet of a Proof of Concept (PoC) “container escape” sparked our interest, since we performed similar research and were curious how this PoC could impact Kubernetes. Quick and dirty way to get out of a privileged k8s […]

Trail of Bits was among the select companies that Forrester invited to participate in its recent report, The Forrester Wave™: Midsize Cybersecurity Consulting Services, Q2 2019. In this evaluation, Trail of Bits was cited as a Leader. We received the highest score among all participants in the current offering category, among the highest scores in […]

LibraBFT is the Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus algorithm used by the recently released Libra cryptocurrency. LibraBFT is based on another BFT consensus algorithm called HotStuff. While some have noted the similarities between the two algorithms, they differ in some crucial respects. In this post we highlight one such difference: in LibraBFT, non-leaders perform broadcasts. […]

Here at Trail of Bits we review a lot of code. From major open source projects to exciting new proprietary software, we’ve seen it all. But one common denominator in all of these systems is that for some inexplicable reason people still seem to think RSA is a good cryptosystem to use. Let me save […]

A denial-of-service (DoS) vulnerability, dubbed ‘Gridlock,’ was publicly reported on July 1st in one of Edgeware’s smart contracts deployed on Ethereum. As much as $900 million worth of Ether may have been processed by this contract. Edgeware has since acknowledged and fixed the “fatal bug.” When we heard about Gridlock, we ran Slither on the […]

RandomX is a new ASIC and GPU-resistant proof-of-work (PoW) algorithm originally developed for Monero, but potentially useful in any blockchain using PoW that wants to bias towards general purpose CPUs. Trail of Bits was contracted by Arweave to review this novel algorithm in a two person-week engagement and provide guidance on alternate parameter selection. But […]

Today we released a tool, siderophile, that helps Rust developers find fuzzing targets in their codebases. Siderophile trawls your crate’s dependencies and attempts to finds every unsafe function, expression, trait method, etc. It then traces these up the callgraph until it finds the function in your crate that uses the unsafety. It ranks the functions […]

With the release of C++14, the standards committee strengthened one of the coolest modern features of C++: constexpr. Now, C++ developers can write constant expressions and force their evaluation at compile-time, rather than at every invocation by users. This results in faster execution, smaller executables and, surprisingly, safer code. Undefined behavior has been the source […]

A common Go idiom is to (1) panic, (2) recover from the panic in a deferred function, and (3) continue on. In general, this is okay, so long there are no global state changes between the entry point to the function calling defer, and the point at which the panic occurs. Such global state changes […]

Each year, Trail of Bits runs a month-long winter internship aka “winternship” program. This year we were happy to host 4 winterns who contributed to 3 projects. This project comes from Carson Harmon, a new graduate from Purdue interested in compilers and systems engineering, and a new full-time member of our research practice. I set […]

Since March, Trail of Bits has been working with the Python Software Foundation to add two-factor authentication (2FA) to Warehouse, the codebase that powers PyPI. As of today, PyPI members can enable time-based OTP (TOTP) and WebAuthn (currently in beta). If you have an account on PyPI, go enable your preferred 2FA method before you […]

Three weeks ago, we presented our work on Slither at WETSEB, an ICSE workshop. ICSE is a top-tier academic conference, focused on software engineering. This edition of the event went very well. The organizers do their best to attract and engage industrials to the discussions. The conference had many talks in parallel. We wish we […]

QueryCon takes place this week at the Convene Conference Center in Downtown Manhattan, Thursday June 20th- Friday June 21st. If you don’t have a ticket yet, get one while you can. QueryCon is an annual conference about osquery, the open source project that’s helping many top tech companies manage their endpoints. We’ve been big fans […]

Trail of Bits has released Indurative, a cryptographic library that enables authentication of a wide variety of data structures without requiring users to write much code. Indurative is useful for everything from data integrity to trustless distributed systems. For instance, developers can use Indurative to add Binary Transparency to a package manager — so users […]

Earlier this week, Manticore leapt forward to version 0.3.0. Advances for our symbolic execution engine now include: “fast forwarding” through concrete execution that you don’t care about, support for Linux binaries statically compiled for AArch64, and an interface for selectively solving for interesting test cases. We’ve been working really hard on these and other features […]

System administrators use osquery for endpoint telemetry and daily monitoring. Security threat hunters use it to find indicators of compromise on their systems. Now another audience is discovering osquery: forensic analysts. While osquery core is great for querying various system-level data remotely, forensics extensions will give it the ability to inspect to deeper-level data structures […]

If unit tests are important to you, there’s now another reason to use DeepState, our Google-Test-like property-based testing tool for C and C++. It’s called Eclipser, a powerful new fuzzer very recently presented in an ICSE 2019 paper. We are proud to announce that Eclipser is now fully integrated into DeepState. Eclipser provides many of […]

Consider our modular trainings. They can be organized to suit your company’s needs. You choose the number of skills and days to spend honing them.

We have published an academic paper on Slither, our static analysis framework for smart contracts, in the International Workshop on Emerging Trends in Software Engineering for Blockchain (WETSEB), colocated with ICSE. Our paper shows that Slither’s bug detection outperforms other static analysis tools for finding issues in smart contracts in terms of speed, robustness, and […]

For months, Facebook has been heavily refactoring the entire osquery codebase, migrating osquery away from standard development tools like CMake and integrating it with Facebook’s internal tooling. Their intention was to improve code quality, implement additional tests, and move the project to a more modular architecture. In practice, the changes sacrificed support for a number […]

Exciting news: We’re hosting the second annual QueryCon on June 20th-21st in New York City, co-sponsored by Kolide and Carbon Black! Register here QueryCon has become the foremost event for the osquery and osql open-source community. QueryCon brings together core maintainers, developers, and end-users to teach, discuss, and collaborate on Facebook’s award-winning open-source endpoint detection […]

Fuzzing is a great way to find bugs in software, but many developers don’t use it. We hope to change that today with the release of Sienna Locomotive, a new open-source fuzzer for Windows that emphasizes usability. Sienna Locomotive aims to make fuzzing accessible to developers with limited security expertise. Its user-oriented features make it […]

For my winternship and springternship at Trail of Bits, I researched novel techniques for symbolic execution on cryptographic protocols. I analyzed various implementation-level bugs in cryptographic libraries, and built a prototype Manticore-based concolic unit testing tool, Sandshrew, that analyzed C cryptographic primitives under a symbolic and concrete environment. Sandshrew is a first step […]

Better Encrypted Group Chat

Crytic: Continuous Assurance for Smart Contracts

Understanding Docker container escapes

Trail of Bits Named in Forrester Wave as a Leader in Midsize Cybersecurity Consulting Services

On LibraBFT’s use of broadcasts

Seriously, stop using RSA

Avoiding Smart Contract “Gridlock” with Slither

State of the Art Proof-of-Work: RandomX

Siderophile: Expose your Crate’s Unsafety

Use constexpr for faster, smaller, and safer code

Panicking the right way in Go

Creating an LLVM Sanitizer from Hopes and Dreams

Getting 2FA Right in 2019

Trail of Bits @ ICSE 2019 – Recap

Why you should go to QueryCon this week

Leaves of Hash

Announcing Manticore 0.3.0

Using osquery for remote forensics

Fuzzing Unit Tests with DeepState and Eclipser

Announcing Automated Reverse Engineering Trainings

Slither: The Leading Static Analyzer for Smart Contracts

Announcing the community-oriented osquery fork, osql

Announcing QueryCon 2019

User-Friendly Fuzzing with Sienna Locomotive

Performing Concolic Execution on Cryptographic Primitives