Tidas: a new service for building password-less appsFor most mobile app developers, password management has as much appeal as a visit to the dentist. You do it because you have to, but it is annoying and easy to screw up, even when using standard libraries or protocols like OAUTH. Your users feel the same way. Even if they know to use strong […]
Join us at Etsy’s Code as CraftWe’re excited to announce that Sophia D’Antoine will be the next featured speaker at Etsy’s Code as Craft series on Wednesday, February 10th from 6:30-8pm in NYC. What is Code as Craft? Etsy Code as Craft events are a semi-monthly series of guest speakers who explore a technical topic or computing trend, sharing both conceptual […]
Software Security Ideas Ahead of Their TimeEvery good security researcher has a well-curated list of blogs they subscribe to. At Trail of Bits, given our interest in software security and its intersections with programming languages, one of our favorites is The Programming Language Enthusiast by Michael Hicks. Our primary activity is to describe and discuss research about — and the practical […]
Hacking for Charity: Automated Bug-finding in LibOTRAt the end of last year, we had some free time to explore new and interesting uses of the automated bug-finding technology we developed for the DARPA Cyber Grand Challenge. While the rest of the competitors are quietly preparing for the CGC Final Event, we can entertain you with tales of running our bug-finding tools […]
2015 In ReviewNow that the new year is upon us, we can look back and take assessment of 2015. The past year saw Trail of Bits continuing our prior work, such as automated vulnerability discovery and remediation, and branching out into new areas, like secure self-hosted video chat. We also increased our community outreach: we advocated against reactionary regulation, supported security-related non-profits, hosted a bi-monthly security meetup in NYC, and more.
Let’s Encrypt the InternetWe’re excited to announce our financial support for Let’s Encrypt, the open, automated and free SSL Certificate Authority (CA) that went into public beta on December 3. With so much room for improvement in the CA space, Let’s Encrypt offers a refreshing, promising vision of encrypting the web. Expensive SSL certificates are holding back Internet […]
Self-Hosted Video Chat with TuberToday, we’re releasing the source code to our self-hosted video chat platform, Tuber Time Communications (or just “Tuber”). We’ve been using Tuber for private video calls with up to 15 members of our team over the last year or two. We want you to use it, protect your privacy, and help us make it better. […]
Why we give so much to CSAWIn just a couple of weeks, tens of thousands of students and professionals from all over the world will tune in to cheer on their favorite teams in six competitions. If you’ve been following our blog for some time, you’ll know just what we’re referring to: Cyber Security Awareness Week (CSAW), the nation’s largest student-run cyber security event.
Summer @ Trail of BitsThis summer I’ve had the incredible opportunity to work with Trail of Bits as a high school intern. In return, I am obligated to write a blog post about this internship. So without further ado, here it is. Starting with Fuzzing The summer kicked off with fuzzing, a technique I had heard of but had […]
Flare-On Reversing Challenges 2015This summer FireEye’s FLARE team hosted its second annual Flare-On Challenge targeting reverse engineers, malware analysts, and security professionals. In total, there were eleven challenges, each using different anti-reversing techniques and each in different formats. For example, challenges ranged from simple password crack-mes to kernel drivers to stego in images. This blogpost will highlight four […]
Hardware Side Channels in the CloudAt REcon 2015, I demonstrated a new hardware side channel which targets co-located virtual machines in the cloud. This attack exploits the CPU’s pipeline as opposed to cache tiers which are often used in side channel attacks. When designing or looking for hardware based side channels – specifically in the cloud – I analyzed a […]
How We Fared in the Cyber Grand ChallengeThe Cyber Grand Challenge qualifying event was held on June 3rd, at exactly noon Eastern time. At that instant, our Cyber Reasoning System (CRS) was given 131 purposely built insecure programs. During the following 24 hour period, our CRS was able to identify vulnerabilities in 65 of those programs and rewrite 94 of them to […]
How to Harden Your Google AppsNever let a good incident go to waste. Today, we’re using the OPM incident as an excuse to share with you our top recommendations for shoring up the security of your Google Apps for Work account. More than 5 million companies rely on Google Apps to run their critical business functions, like email, document storage, calendaring, and […]
Introducing the RubySec Field GuideVulnerabilities have been discovered in Ruby applications with the potential to affect vast swathes of the Internet and attract attackers to lucrative targets online. These vulnerabilities take advantage of features and common idioms such as serialization and deserialization of data in the YAML format. Nearly all large, tested and trusted open-source Ruby projects contain some of […]
Closing the Windows GapThe security research community is full of grey beards that earned their stripes writing exploits against mail servers, domain controllers, and TCP/IP stacks. These researchers started writing exploits on platforms like Solaris, IRIX, and BSDi before moving on to Windows exploitation. Now they run companies, write policy, rant on twitter, and testify in front of […]
Empire Hacking, a New Meetup in NYCToday we are launching Empire Hacking, a bi-monthly meetup that focuses on pragmatic security research and new discoveries in attack and defense. Empire Hacking is technical. We aim to bridge the gap between weekend projects and funded research. There won’t be any product pitches here. Come prepared with your best ideas. Empire Hacking is exclusive. […]
The Foundation of 2015: 2014 in ReviewWe need to do more to protect ourselves. 2014 overflowed with front-page proof: Apple, Target, JPMorgan Chase, etc, etc. The current, vulnerable status quo begs for radical change, an influx of talented people, and substantially better tools. As we look ahead to driving that change in 2015, we’re proud to highlight a selection of our […]
Close Encounters with Symbolic Execution (Part 2)This is part two of a two-part blog post that shows how to use KLEE with mcsema to symbolically execute Linux binaries (see the first post!). This part will cover how to build KLEE, mcsema, and provide a detailed example of using them to symbolically execute an existing binary. The binary we’ll be symbolically executing […]
Close Encounters with Symbolic ExecutionAt THREADS 2014, I demonstrated a new capability of mcsema that enables the use of KLEE, a symbolic execution framework, on software available only in binary form. In the talk, I described how to use mcsema and KLEE to learn an unknown protocol defined in a binary that has never been seen before. In the example, […]
Speaker Lineup for THREADS ’14: Scaling SecurityFor every security engineer you train, there are 20 or more developers writing code with potential vulnerabilities. There’s no human way to keep up. We need to be more effective with less resources. It’s time to make security a fully integrated part of modern software development and operations. It’s time to automate. This year’s THREADS […]
We’re Sponsoring the NYU-Poly Women’s Cybersecurity SymposiumCyber security is an increasingly complex and vibrant field that requires brilliant and driven people to work on diverse teams. Unfortunately, women are severely underrepresented and we want to change that. Career Discovery in Cyber Security is an NYU-Poly event, created in a collaboration with influential men and women in the industry. This annual symposium […]
Enabling Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) for Apple ID and DropBoxStep-by-step guide to enabling SMS-based two-factor authentication on your Apple ID and Dropbox accounts to protect against password-based attacks.
ReMASTering Applications by Obfuscating during CompilationIn this post, we discuss the creation of a novel software obfuscation toolkit, MAST, implemented in the LLVM compiler and suitable for denying program understanding to even the most well-resourced adversary. Our implementation is inspired by effective obfuscation techniques used by nation-state malware and techniques discussed in academic literature. MAST enables software developers to protect […]
McSema is Officially Open Source!We are proud to announce that McSema is now open source! McSema is a framework for analyzing and transforming machine-code programs to LLVM bitcode. It supports translation of x86 machine code, including integer, floating point, and SSE instructions. We previously covered some features of McSema in an earlier blog post and in our talk at ReCON 2014. Our […]
Education Initiative Spotlight: THREADS Call for PapersA 2-day conference exploring state-of-the-art advances in security automation. We would like to share the call for papers for THREADS 2014, a research and development conference that is part of NYU-Poly’s Cyber Security Awareness Week (CSAW). Trail of Bits is a founding sponsor of THREADS. The final deadline for submissions is October 6th, but you […]
