The Trail of Bits Blog

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 […]

It is time for the second installment of our efforts to reproduce original fuzzing research on modern systems. If you haven’t yet, please read the first part. This time we tackle fuzzing on Windows by reproducing the results of “An Empirical Study of the Robustness of Windows NT Applications Using Random Testing” (aka ‘the NT […]

TLS 1.3 represents the culmination of over two decades of experience in deploying large-scale transport security. For the most part it simplifies and improves the security of TLS and can act as a drop-in replacement for TLS 1.2. However, one new feature in the protocol represents a significant security risk to some existing applications: TLS […]

Each year, Trail of Bits runs a month-long winter internship “winternship” program. This year we were happy to host 4 winterns who contributed to 3 projects. This is the first in a series of blog posts covering the 2019 Wintern class. Our first report is from Vaibhav Sharma (@vbsharma), a PhD student at the University […]

Alex Groce, Associate Professor, School of Informatics, Computing and Cyber Systems, Northern Arizona University Mutation Testing Introducing one bug by hand (as we did in Part 1) is fine, and we could try it again, but “the plural of anecdote is not data.” However, this is not strictly true. If we have enough anecdotes, we […]

Alex Groce, Associate Professor, School of Informatics, Computing and Cyber Systems, Northern Arizona University Using DeepState, we took a handwritten red-black tree fuzzer and, with minimal effort, turned it into a much more fully featured test generator. The DeepState fuzzer, despite requiring no more coding effort, supports replay of regression tests, reduction of the size […]

C++ programs using exceptions are problematic for binary lifters. The non-local control-flow “throw” and “catch” operations that appear in C++ source code do not map neatly to straightforward binary representations. One could allege that the compiler, runtime, and stack unwinding library collude to make exceptions work. We recently completed our investigation into exceptions and can […]

On December 12, over 150 attendees joined a special, half-day Empire Hacking to learn about pitfalls in smart contract security and how to avoid them. Thank you to everyone who came, to our superb speakers, and to BuzzFeed for hosting this meetup at their office. Watch the presentations again It’s hard to find such rich […]

We open-sourced a fault injection tool, KRF, that uses kernel-space syscall interception. You can use it today to find faulty assumptions (and resultant bugs) in your programs. Check it out! This post covers intercepting system calls from within the Linux kernel, via a plain old kernel module. We’ll go through a quick refresher on syscalls […]

Trying to make a living as a programmer participating in bug bounties is the same as convincing yourself that you’re good enough at Texas Hold ‘Em to quit your job. There’s data to back this up in Fixing a Hole: The Labor Market for Bugs, a chapter in New Solutions for Cybersecurity, by Ryan Ellis, […]

This year for CSAW CTF, Trail of Bits contributed two cryptography problems. In the first problem, you could combine two bugs to break DSA much like the Playstation 3 firmware hackers. The other challenge–-weirder and mathier–-was split into two parts: one for the qualifiers, one in finals. This challenge, “Holywater,” was some of the most fun I’ve ever had making a CTF problem.

With 2019 a day away, let’s reflect on the past to see how we can improve. Yes, let’s take a long look back 30 years and reflect on the original fuzzing paper, An Empirical Study of the Reliability of UNIX Utilities, and its 1995 follow-up, Fuzz Revisited, by Barton P. Miller. In this blog post, […]

The Trail of Bits SummerCon Fellowship program is now accepting applications from emerging security researchers with excellent project ideas. Fellows will explore their research topics with our guidance and then present their findings at SummerCon 2019. We will be reserving at least 50% of our funding for marginalized, female-identifying, transgender, and non-binary candidates. If you’re […]

The Trail of Bits cryptographic services team contributed two cryptography CTF challenges to the recent CSAW CTF. Today we’re going to cover the easier one, titled “Disastrous Security Apparatus – Good luck, ‘k?” This problem involves the Digital Signature Algorithm (DSA) and the way an apparently secure algorithm can be made entirely insecure through surprising […]

Earlier this year, the Web3 Foundation (W3F) commissioned Trail of Bits for a security review and assessment of the risks in storing cryptocurrency. Everyone who owns cryptocurrency — from large institutions to individual enthusiasts — shares the W3F’s concerns. In service to the broader community, the W3F encouraged us to publish our recommendations for the […]

Remember last December’s Empire Hacking? The one where we dedicated the event to sharing the best information about blockchain and smart contract security? Let’s do that again, and let’s make it a tradition; a half-day mini conference focused exclusively on a single topic every December. On December 12, please join us at Buzzfeed’s NYC offices […]

We wanted to make up for missing the first three Devcons, so we participated in this year’s event through a number of talks, a panel, and two trainings. For those of you who couldn’t join us, we’ve summarized our contributions below. We hope to see you there next year. Using Manticore and Symbolic Execution to […]

Building and using cryptographic libraries is notoriously difficult. Even when each component of the system has been implemented correctly (quite difficult to do), improperly combining these pieces can lead to disastrous results. Cryptography, when rolled right, forms the bedrock of any secure application. By combining cutting-edge mathematics and disciplined software engineering, modern crypto-systems guarantee data and communication privacy.

Smart contracts can be compromised: they can have bugs, the owner’s wallet can be stolen, or they can be trapped due to an incorrect setting. If you develop a smart contract for your business, you must be prepared to react to events such as these. In many cases, the only available solution is to deploy […]

Let’s automatically identify weird machines in software. Combating software exploitation has been a cat-and-mouse game ever since the Morris worm in 1988. Attackers use specific exploitation primitives to achieve unintended code execution. Major software vendors introduce exploit mitigation to break those primitives. Back and forth, back and forth. The mitigations have certainly raised the bar […]

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

Fuzzing In The Year 2000

What Application Developers Need To Know About TLS Early Data (0RTT)

Symbolic Path Merging in Manticore

Fuzzing an API with DeepState (Part 2)

Fuzzing an API with DeepState (Part 1)

How McSema Handles C++ Exceptions

Empire Hacking: Ethereum Edition 2

How to write a rootkit without really trying

On Bounties and Boffins

What do La Croix, octonions, and Second Life have in common?

Fuzzing Like It’s 1989

$10,000 research fellowships for underrepresented talent

CSAW CTF Crypto Challenge: Breaking DSA

10 Rules for the Secure Use of Cryptocurrency Hardware Wallets

Return of the Blockchain Security Empire Hacking

Trail of Bits @ Devcon IV Recap

We crypto now

How contract migration works

The Good, the Bad, and the Weird