We found cryptography bugs in the elliptic library using WycheproofTrail of Bits discovered and disclosed two vulnerabilities in the widely used elliptic JavaScript library that could allow signature forgery or prevent valid signature verification, with one vulnerability still unfixed after the 90-day disclosure window.
Building checksec without boundaries with Checksec AnywhereChecksec Anywhere consolidates fragmented binary security analysis tools into a browser-based platform that analyzes ELF, PE, and Mach-O formats locally without compromising privacy or performance.
Intern projects that outlived the internshipOur business operations intern at Trail of Bits built two AI-powered tools that became permanent company resources—a podcast workflow that saves 1,250 hours annually and a Slack exporter that enables efficient knowledge retrieval across the organization.
“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. […]
Using benchmarks to speed up EchidnaDuring my time as a Trail of Bits associate last summer, I worked on optimizing the performance of Echidna, Trail of Bits’ open-source smart contract fuzzer, written in Haskell. Through extensive use of profilers and other tools, I was able to pinpoint and debug a massive space leak in one of Echidna’s […]
Catching OpenSSL misuse using CodeQLI’ve created five CodeQL queries that catch potentially potent bugs in the OpenSSL libcrypto API, a widely adopted but often unforgiving API that can be misused to cause memory leaks, authentication bypasses, and other subtle cryptographic issues in implementations. These queries—which I developed during my internship with my mentors, Fredrik Dahlgren and […]
Summer interns 2023 recapThis past summer at Trail of Bits was a season of inspiration, innovation, and growth thanks to the incredible contributions of our talented interns, who took on a diverse range of technical projects under the mentorship of Trail of Bits engineers. We’d like to delve into their accomplishments, from enhancing the efficiency of fuzzing tools […]
A Winter’s Tale: Improving messages and types in GDB’s Python APIAs a winter associate at Trail of Bits, my goal was to make two improvements to the GNU Project Debugger (GDB): make it run faster and improve its Python API to support and improve tools that rely on it, like Pwndbg. The main goal was to run […]
Harnessing the eBPF VerifierDuring my internship at Trail of Bits, I prototyped a harness that improves the testability of the eBPF verifier, simplifying the testing of eBPF programs. My eBPF harness runs in user space, independently of any locally running kernel, and thus opens the door to testing of eBPF programs across different kernel versions. […]
Keeping the wolves out of wolfSSLTrail of Bits is publicly disclosing four vulnerabilities that affect wolfSSL: CVE-2022-38152, CVE-2022-38153, CVE-2022-39173, and CVE-2022-42905. The four issues, which have CVSS scores ranging from medium to critical, can all result in a denial of service (DoS). These vulnerabilities have been discovered automatically using the novel protocol fuzzer tlspuffin. This blog post […]
Fast and accurate syntax searching for C and C++The naive approach to searching for patterns in source code is to use regular expressions; a better way is to parse the code with a custom parser, but both of these approaches have limitations. During my internship, I prototyped an internal tool called Syntex that does searching on Clang ASTs to avoid […]
Manticore GUIs made easyTrail of Bits maintains Manticore, a symbolic execution engine that can analyze smart contracts and native binaries. While symbolic execution is a powerful technique that can augment the vulnerability discovery process, it requires some base domain knowledge and thus has its own learning curve. Given the plethora […]
Look out! Divergent representations are everywhere!Trail of Bits recently published a blog post about a signed integer overflow in certain versions of SQLite that can enable arbitrary code execution and result in a denial of service. While working on proof-of-concept exploits for that vulnerability, we noticed that the compiler’s representation of an important integer variable is semantically […]
Stranger Strings: An exploitable flaw in SQLiteTrail of Bits is publicly disclosing CVE-2022-35737, which affects applications that use the SQLite library API. CVE-2022-35737 was introduced in SQLite version 1.0.12 (released on October 17, 2000) and fixed in release 3.39.2 (released on July 21, 2022). CVE-2022-35737 is exploitable on 64-bit systems, and exploitability depends on how the program is […]
Porting the Solana eBPF JIT compiler to ARM64Andrew Haberlandt During my summer internship at Trail of Bits, I worked on the fork of the RBPF JIT compiler that is used to execute Solana smart contracts. The RBPF JIT compiler plays a critical role on the Solana blockchain, as it facilitates the execution of contracts on validator nodes by default. Before my […]
Working on blockchains as a Trail of Bits internEarlier this year, I successfully completed my internship at Trail of Bits and secured a full-time position as a Blockchain Security Analyst. This post is not intended to be a technical description of the work I did during my internship. Rather, it is intended to describe my general experience as a […]
Magnifier: An Experiment with Interactive DecompilationToday, we are releasing Magnifier, an experimental reverse engineering user interface I developed during my internship. Magnifier asks, “What if, as an alternative to taking handwritten notes, reverse engineering researchers could interactively reshape a decompiled program to reflect what they would normally record?” With Magnifier, the decompiled C code isn’t the end—it’s […]
Improving the state of go-fuzzDuring my winternship, I used the findings from recent Go audits to make several improvements to go-fuzz, a coverage-based fuzzer for projects written in Go. I focused on three enhancements to improve the effectiveness of Go fuzzing campaigns and provide a better experience for users. I contributed to fixing type alias […]
MUI: Visualizing symbolic execution with Manticore and Binary NinjaDuring my summer internship, I had the wonderful opportunity to work on the Manticore User Interface (MUI). The MUI project aims to combine the strength of both Manticore, a powerful symbolic execution library, and Binary Ninja, a popular binary analysis tool, to provide a more intuitive and visual interface […]
PrivacyRaven: Implementing a proof of concept for model inversionOriginally published August 3, 2021 During my Trail of Bits winternship and springternship, I had the pleasure of working with Suha Hussain and Jim Miller on PrivacyRaven, a Python-based tool for testing deep-learning frameworks against a plethora of privacy attacks. I worked on improving PrivacyRaven’s versatility by adding compatibility for services […]
Solar: Context-free, interactive analysis for SolidityWe’re hiring for our Research + Engineering team! By Aaron Yoo, University of California, Los Angeles As an intern at Trail of Bits, I worked on Solar, a proof-of-concept static analysis framework. Solar is unique because it enables context-free interactive analysis of Solidity smart contracts. A user can direct Solar to explore program paths (e.g., […]
Un-bee-lievable Performance: Fast Coverage-guided Fuzzing with Honeybee and Intel Processor TraceToday, we are releasing an experimental coverage-guided fuzzer called Honeybee that records program control flow using Intel Processor Trace (IPT) technology. Previously, IPT has been scrutinized for severe underperformance due to issues with capture systems and inefficient trace analyses. My winter internship focused on working through these challenges to make […]
Reverie: An optimized zero-knowledge proof systemZero-knowledge proofs, once a theoretical curiosity, have recently seen widespread deployment in blockchain systems such as Zcash and Monero. However, most blockchain applications of ZK proofs make proof size and performance tradeoffs that are a poor fit for other use-cases. In particular, these protocols often require an elaborate trusted setup phase and optimize for proof […]
Efficient audits with machine learning and Slither-similTrail of Bits has manually curated a wealth of data—years of security assessment reports—and now we’re exploring how to use this data to make the smart contract auditing process more efficient with Slither-simil. Based on accumulated knowledge embedded in previous audits, we set out to detect similar vulnerable code snippets […]
Let’s build a high-performance fuzzer with GPUs!TL;DR: Can we use GPUs to get 10x performance/dollar when fuzzing embedded software in the cloud? Based on our preliminary work, we think the answer is yes! Fuzzing is a software testing technique that supplies programs with many randomized inputs in an attempt to cause unexpected behavior. It’s an important, […]
