Trail of Bits' Buttercup wins 2nd place in AIxCC ChallengeOur team won the runner-up prize of $3M at DARPA’s AI Cyber Challenge, demonstrating Buttercup’s world-class automated vulnerability discovery and patching capabilities with remarkable cost efficiency.
Buttercup is now open-source!Now that DARPA’s AI Cyber Challenge (AIxCC) has officially ended, we can finally make Buttercup, our CRS (Cyber Reasoning System), open source!
AIxCC finals: Tale of the tapeWhile the AIxCC winner has not yet been announced, differences in the finalists’ approaches show that there are multiple viable paths forward to using AI for vulnerability detection.
Detecting code copying at scale with VendetectVendetect is our new open-source tool for detecting copied and vendored code between repositories. It uses semantic fingerprinting to identify similar code even when variable names change or comments disappear. More importantly, unlike academic plagiarism detectors, it understands version control history, helping you trace vendored code back to its exact source commit.
Investigate your dependencies with DeptectiveDeptective, our new open-source tool, automatically finds the packages needed to install software dependencies. It does so not based on the software’s self-reported requirements, but by observing what the software needs at runtime.
Buckle up, Buttercup, AIxCC’s scored round is underway!Our CRS (Cyber Reasoning System), Buttercup, is now competing in the one and only scored round of DARPA’s AI Cyber Challenge (AIxCC) against six other teams to see which autonomous AI-driven system can find and patch the most software vulnerabilities.
Datasig: Fingerprinting AI/ML datasets to stop data-borne attacksDatasig generates compact, unique fingerprints for AI/ML datasets that let you compare training data with high accuracy—without needing access to the raw data itself.This critical capability helps AIBOM (AI bill of materials) tools detect data-borne vulnerabilities that traditional security tools completely miss.
Preventing account takeover on centralized cryptocurrency exchanges in 2025This blog post highlights key points from our new white paper Preventing Account Takeovers on Centralized Cryptocurrency Exchanges, which documents ATO-related attack vectors and defenses tailored to CEXes. Imagine trying to log in to your centralized cryptocurrency exchange (CEX) account and your password and username just… don’t work. You […]
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 […]
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.
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, […]
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 […]
A peek into build provenance for HomebrewLast November, we announced our collaboration with Alpha-Omega and OpenSSF to add build provenance to Homebrew. Today, we are pleased to announce that the core of that work is live and in public beta: homebrew-core is now cryptographically attesting to all bottles built in the official Homebrew CI. You […]
The life and times of an Abstract Syntax TreeYou’ve reached computer programming nirvana. Your journey has led you down many paths, including believing that God wrote the universe in LISP, but now the truth is clear in your mind: every problem can be solved by writing one more compiler. It’s true. Even our soon-to-be artificially intelligent overlords are nothing but […]
Binary type inference in GhidraTrail of Bits is releasing BTIGhidra, a Ghidra extension that helps reverse engineers by inferring type information from binaries. The analysis is inter-procedural, propagating and resolving type constraints between functions while consuming user input to recover additional type information. This refined type information produces more idiomatic decompilation, enhancing reverse engineering comprehension. The […]
Finding bugs in C code with Multi-Level IR and VASTIntermediate languages (IRs) are what reverse engineers and vulnerability researchers use to see the forest for the trees. IRs are used to view programs at different abstraction layers, so that analysis can understand both low-level code aberrations and higher levels of flawed logic mistakes. The setback is that bug-finding tools are often pigeonholed into choosing […]
Introducing Windows Notification Facility’s (WNF) Code IntegrityWNF (Windows Notification Facility) is an undocumented notification mechanism that allows communication inside processes, between processes, or between user mode processes and kernel drivers. Similar to other notification mechanisms like ETW (Event Tracing for Windows) and ALPC (Advanced Local Procedure Call), WNF communication happens over different “channels,” each representing […]
How to avoid the aCropalypseThe aCropalypse is upon us! Last week, news about CVE-2023-21036, nicknamed the “aCropalypse,” spread across Twitter and other media, and I quickly realized that the underlying flaw could be detected by our tool, PolyTracker. I’ll explain how PolyTracker can detect files affected by the vulnerability even without specific file format knowledge.
Introducing RPC InvestigatorA new tool for Windows RPC research. Trail of Bits is releasing a new tool for exploring RPC clients and servers on Windows. RPC Investigator is a .NET application that builds on the NtApiDotNet platform for enumerating, decompiling/parsing and communicating with arbitrary RPC servers. We’ve added visualization and additional features that offer […]
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 […]
Secure your machine learning with Semgreptl;dr: Our publicly available Semgrep ruleset now has 11 rules dedicated to the misuse of machine learning libraries. Try it out now! Picture this: You’ve spent months curating images, trying out different architectures, downloading pretrained models, messing with Kubernetes, and you’re finally ready to ship your sparkling new machine learning (ML) product. […]
libmagic: The BlatheringA couple of years ago we released PolyFile: a utility to identify and map the semantic structure of files, including polyglots, chimeras, and schizophrenic files. It’s a bit like file, binwalk, and Kaitai Struct all rolled into one. PolyFile initially used the TRiD definition database for file identification. However, […]
Are blockchains decentralized?A new Trail of Bits research report examines unintended centralities in distributed ledgers Blockchains can help push the boundaries of current technology in useful ways. However, to make good risk decisions involving exciting and innovative technologies, people need demonstrable facts that are arrived at through reproducible methods and open data. We believe the risks inherent […]
Interactive decompilation with rellic-xrefRellic is a framework for analyzing and decompiling LLVM modules into C code, implementing the concepts described in the original paper presenting the Dream decompiler and its successor, Dream++. It recently made an appearance on this blog when I presented rellic-headergen, a tool for extracting debug metadata from LLVM modules and turning […]
