The Trail of Bits Blog

THE TRAIL OF BITS BLOG

We’re proud to be a sponsor of the first Build it Break it programming contest, run by the University of Maryland (UMD) and supported by one of our own employees and PhD student at the university, Andrew Ruef. Build it Break it is a “flipped CTF” where contestants both implement secure software and identify vulnerabilities in […]

At Trail of Bits we are proud of our roots in academia and research, and we believe it is important to promote cyber security education for students of every academic level. We recently sponsored a High School Capture the Flag (CTF) event, we released a CTF Field Guide, and we are a regular part of […]

New York, NY (July 15th, 2014)—Veteran computer security researcher Nicholas DePetrillo has joined Trail of Bits, the New York-based security company, as Principal Security Researcher. Trail of Bits Co-founder and CEO Dan Guido announced the hire today. DePetrillo brings the headcount of the firm, which was founded by a team of three in 2012, to […]

On June 28th Artem Dinaburg and Andrew Ruef will be speaking at REcon 2014 about a project named McSema. McSema is a framework for translating x86 binaries into LLVM bitcode. This translation is the opposite of what happens inside a compiler. A compiler translates LLVM bitcode to x86 machine code. McSema translates x86 machine code into LLVM […]

Trail of Bits headquarters has moved! Located in the heart of the financial district, our new office features a unique design, cool modern decor, and an open layout that makes us feel right at home.

We are proud to have one of the only seven accepted funded-track proposals to DARPA’s Cyber Grand Challenge. Computer security experts from academia, industry and the larger security community have organized themselves into more than 30 teams to compete in DARPA’s Cyber Grand Challenge —- a first-of-its-kind tournament designed to speed the development of automated security […]

Free Online Coursework Allows Students, Professionals to Build Essential Offensive Security Skills New York, NY (May 20, 2014)–Security researchers at Trail of Bits today introduced the CTF Field Guide (Capture the Flag), a freely available, self-guided online course designed to help university and high school students hone the skills needed to succeed in the fast-paced, […]

Background Friday night I sat down with a glass of Macallan 15 and decided to write a static checker that would find the Heartbleed bug. I decided that I would write it as an out-of-tree clang analyzer plugin and evaluate it on a few very small functions that had the spirit of the Heartbleed bug […]

Javelin shows you how modern attackers would approach and exploit your enterprise. By simulating real-time, real-world attack techniques, Javelin identifies which employees are most likely to be targets of spearphishing campaigns, uncovers security infrastructure weaknesses, and compares overall vulnerability against industry competitors. Javelin benchmarks the efficacy of defensive strategies, and provides customized recommendations for improving […]

Have you ever wanted to make a query into a native mode program asking about program locations that write a specific value to a register? Have you ever wanted to automatically deobfuscate obfuscated strings? Reverse engineering a native program involves understanding its semantics at a low level until a high level picture of functionality emerges. […]

Today we’re excited to release an open-source version of iVerify! iPhone users now have an easy way to ensure their phones are free of malware. iVerify validates the integrity of supported iOS devices and detects modifications that malware or jailbreaking would make, without the use of signatures. It runs at boot-time and thoroughly inspects the […]

We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming to bring you an important announcement: On Thursday, June 6th, just in time for SummerCon, we will be hosting a free Ruby Security Workshop in NYC! Signups are first-come, first-serve and we only have space for 30 people. Sign up here and we will email the selected participants the location […]

In the final part of our three-part series, we investigate the how the toolkit user gained control of program flow and what their strategy means for the reliability of their exploit. Elderwood and the Department of Labor Hack Writing Exploits with the Elderwood Kit (Part 1) Writing Exploits with the Elderwood Kit (Part 2) Last time, […]

In the second part of our three-part series, we investigate the tools provided by the Elderwood kit for developing exploits from discovered vulnerabilities. Elderwood and the Department of Labor Hack Writing Exploits with the Elderwood Kit (Part 1) Writing Exploits with the Elderwood Kit (Part 2) Several mitigations must be avoided or bypassed in order […]

Recently, the Department of Labor (DoL) and several other websites were compromised to host a new zero-day exploit in Internet Explorer 8 (CVE-2013-1347). Researchers noted similarities between this attack and earlier ones attributed to Elderwood, a distinct set of tools used to develop several past strategic website compromises. We have not, however, identified any evidence […]

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 […]

One of the more interesting aspects of the Flame malware was the MD5 collision attack that was used to infect new machines through Windows Update. MD5 collisions are not new, but this is the first attack discovered in the wild and deserves a more in-depth look. Trail of Bits is uniquely qualified to perform this […]