Auditing the Ruby ecosystem's central package repositoryRuby Central hired Trail of Bits to complete a security assessment and a competitive analysis of RubyGems.org, the official package management system for Ruby applications. With over 184+ billion downloads to date, RubyGems.org is critical infrastructure for the Ruby language ecosystem.
35 more Semgrep rules: infrastructure, supply chain, and RubyWe are publishing another set of custom Semgrep rules, bringing our total number of public rules to 115. This blog post will briefly cover the new rules, then explore two Semgrep features in depth: regex mode (especially how it compares against generic mode), and HCL language support for technologies […]
Evaluating Solidity support in AI coding assistantsAI-enabled code assistants (like GitHub’s Copilot, Continue.dev, and Tabby) are making software development faster and more productive. Unfortunately, these tools are often bad at Solidity. So we decided to improve them! To make it easier to write, edit, and understand Solidity with AI-enabled tools, we have: Added support for Solidity into Tabby […]
Attestations: A new generation of signatures on PyPIFor the past year, we’ve worked with the Python Package Index (PyPI) on a new security feature for the Python ecosystem: index-hosted digital attestations, as specified in PEP 740. These attestations improve on traditional PGP signatures (which have been disabled on PyPI) by providing key usability, index verifiability, cryptographic strength, and provenance properties that bring […]
Killing Filecoin nodesIn January, we identified and reported a vulnerability in the Lotus and Venus clients of the Filecoin network that allowed an attacker to remotely crash a node and trigger a denial of service. This issue is caused by an incorrect validation of an index, resulting in an index out-of-range panic. The vulnerability […]
Fuzzing between the lines in popular barcode softwareFuzzing—one of the most successful techniques for finding security bugs, consistently featured in articles and industry conferences—has become so popular that you may think most important software has already been extensively fuzzed. But that’s not always the case. In this blog post, we show how we fuzzed the ZBar barcode scanning library […]
A deep dive into Linux’s new mseal syscallIf you love exploit mitigations, you may have heard of a new system call named mseal landing into the Linux kernel’s 6.10 release, providing a protection called “memory sealing.” Beyond notes from the authors, very little information about this mitigation exists. In this blog post, we’ll explain what this syscall is, including […]
Auditing Gradio 5, Hugging Face’s ML GUI frameworkThis is a joint post with the Hugging Face Gradio team; read their announcement here! You can find the full report with all of the detailed findings from our security audit of Gradio 5 here. Hugging Face hired Trail of Bits to audit Gradio 5, a popular open-source library that provides a web interface that […]
Securing the software supply chain with the SLSA frameworkSoftware supply chain security has been a hot topic since the Solarwinds breach back in 2020. Thanks to the Supply-chain Levels for Software Artifacts (SLSA) framework, the software industry is now at the threshold of sustainably solving many of the biggest challenges in securely building and distributing open-source software. SLSA is a […]
A few notes on AWS Nitro Enclaves: Attack surfaceIn the race to secure cloud applications, AWS Nitro Enclaves have emerged as a powerful tool for isolating sensitive workloads.But with great power comes great responsibility-and potential security pitfalls. As pioneers in confidential computing security, we atTrail of Bits have scrutinized the attack surface of AWS Nitro Enclaves, uncovering potential bugs that could compromise even thesehardened environments.
Announcing the Trail of Bits and Semgrep partnershipAt Trail of Bits, we aim to share and develop tools and resources used in our security assessments with the broader security community. Many clients, we observed, don’t use Semgrep to its fullest potential or even at all. To bridge this gap and encourage broader adoption, our CEO, Dan Guido, initiated discussions with the Semgrep […]
Inside DEF CON: Michael Brown on how AI/ML is revolutionizing cybersecurityAt DEF CON, Michael Brown, Principal Security Engineer at Trail of Bits, sat down with Michael Novinson from Information Security Media Group (ISMG) to discuss four critical areas where AI/ML is revolutionizing security. Here’s what they covered: AI/ML techniques surpass the limits of traditional software analysis As Moore’s law slows down after 20 years of […]
Friends don’t let friends reuse IVsIf you’ve encountered cryptography software, you’ve probably heard the advice to never use an IV twice—in fact, that’s exactly where the other common name, nonce (number used once), comes from. Depending on the cryptography involved, a reused nonce can reveal encrypted messages, or even leak your secret key! But common knowledge may not cover every […]
Sanitize your C++ containers: ASan annotations step-by-stepAddressSanitizer (ASan) is a compiler plugin that helps detect memory errors like buffer overflows or use-after-frees. In this post, we explain how to equip your C++ code with ASan annotations to find more bugs. We also show our work on ASan in GCC and LLVM. In LLVM, Trail of […]
“Unstripping” binaries: Restoring debugging information in GDB with PwndbgGDB loses significant functionality when debugging binaries that lack debugging symbols (also known as “stripped binaries”). Function and variable names become meaningless addresses; setting breakpoints requires tracking down relevant function addresses from an external source; and printing out structured values involves staring at a memory dump trying to manually discern field boundaries. […]
What would you do with that old GPU?(Would you get up and throw it away?) [sing to the tune of The Beatles – With A Little Help From My Friends] Here’s a riddle: when new GPUs are constantly being produced, product cycles are ~18-24 months long, and each cycle doubles GPU power (per Huang’s Law), what […]
Provisioning cloud infrastructure the wrong way, but fasterToday we’re going to provision some cloud infrastructure the Max Power way: by combining automation with unchecked AI output. Unfortunately, this method produces cloud infrastructure code that 1) works and 2) has terrible security properties. In a nutshell, AI-based tools like Claude and ChatGPT readily provide extremely bad cloud infrastructure provisioning code, […]
“YOLO” is not a valid hash constructionAmong the cryptographic missteps we see at Trail of Bits, “let’s build our own tool out of a hash function” is one of the most common. Clients have a problem along the lines of “we need to hash a bunch of different values together” or “we need a MAC” or “we need […]
We wrote the code, and the code wonEarlier this week, NIST officially announced three standards specifying FIPS-approved algorithms for post-quantum cryptography. The Stateless Hash-Based Digital Signature Algorithm (SLH-DSA) is one of these standardized algorithms. The Trail of Bits cryptography team has been anticipating this announcement, and we are excited to share an announcement of our own: we built an open-source pure-Rust implementation of SLH-DSA, which has been merged into RustCrypto.
Trail of Bits Advances to AIxCC FinalsTrail of Bits has qualified for the final round of DARPA’s AI Cyber Challenge (AIxCC)! Our Cyber Reasoning System, Buttercup, placed in the top 7 out of 39 teams competing in the semifinal round held at DEF CON 2024. Competition Overview The AIxCC semifinal featured a series of challenges based on real-world software, including nginx, […]
Trail of Bits’ Buttercup heads to DARPA’s AIxCCWith DARPA’s AI Cyber Challenge (AIxCC) semifinal starting today at DEF CON 2024, we want to introduce Buttercup, our AIxCC submission. Buttercup is a Cyber Reasoning System (CRS) that combines conventional cybersecurity techniques like fuzzing and static analysis with AI and machine learning to find and fix software vulnerabilities. The system is designed to operate […]
Cloud cryptography demystified: Google Cloud PlatformThis post, the second in our series on cryptography in the cloud, provides an overview of the cloud cryptography services offered within Google Cloud Platform (GCP): when to use them, when not to use them, and important usage considerations. Stay tuned for future posts covering other cloud services. At Trail of Bits, […]
Our audit of HomebrewThis is a joint post with the Homebrew maintainers; read their announcement here! Last summer, we performed an audit of Homebrew. Our audit’s scope included Homebrew/brew itself (home of the brew CLI), and three adjacent repositories responsible for various security-relevant aspects of Homebrew’s operation: Homebrew/actions: a repository of custom GitHub Actions used […]
Our crypto experts answer 10 key questionsCryptography is a fundamental part of electronics and the internet that helps secure credit cards, cell phones, web browsing (fingers crossed you’re using TLS!), and even top-secret military data. Cryptography is just as essential in the blockchain space, with blockchains like Ethereum depending on hashes, Merkle trees, and ECDSA signatures, among other […]
Announcing AES-GEM (AES with Galois Extended Mode)Today, AES-GCM is one of two cipher modes used by TLS 1.3 (the other being ChaCha20-Poly1305) and the preferred method for encrypting data in FIPS-validated modules. But despite its overwhelming success, AES-GCM has been the root cause of some catastrophic failures: for example, Hanno Böck and Sean Devlin exploited nonce misuse to […]
