mitigations - The Trail of Bits Blog

GWP-ASan is a sampling-based memory error detection tool that catches critical bugs like use-after-free and buffer overflows in production environments with near-zero performance overhead, unlike AddressSanitizer which is too resource-intensive for deployment.

We identified 10 security vulnerabilities within the caddy-security plugin for the Caddy web server that could enable a variety of high-severity attacks in web applications, including client-side code execution, OAuth replay attacks, and unauthorized access to resources. During our evaluation, Caddy was deployed as a reverse proxy […]

During a security audit, I discovered an easy-to-miss typo that unintentionally failed to enable _FORTIFY_SOURCE, which helps detect memory corruption bugs in incorrectly used C functions. We searched, found, and fixed twenty C and C++ bugs on GitHub with this same pattern. Here is a list of some of them related […]

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 […]

We’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 […]

Today, 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, […]

Microsoft exposed their users to a lot of risks when they released Windows Defender without a sandbox. This surprised me. Sandboxing is one of the most effective security-hardening techniques. Why did Microsoft sandbox other high-value attack surfaces such as the JIT code in Microsoft Edge, but leave Windows Defender undefended? As a proof of concept, […]

Admit it. Every now and then someone does something, and you think: “I also had that idea!” You feel validated — a kindred spirit has had the same intuitions, the same insights, and even drawn the same conclusions. I was reminded of this feeling recently when I came across a paper describing how to use […]

This blog has promoted control flow integrity (CFI) as a game changing security mitigation and encouraged its use. We wanted to take our own security advice and start securing software we use. To that end, we decided to apply CFI to facebook’s osquery, a cross-platform codebase with which we are deeply familiar. Using osquery, we […]

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 […]

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 […]

ExploitShield has been marketed as offering protection “against all known and unknown 0-day day vulnerability exploits, protecting users where traditional anti-virus and security products fail.” I found this assertion quite extraordinary and exciting! Vulnerabilities in software applications are real problems for computer users worldwide. So far, we have been pretty bad at providing actual technology […]