Improving the state of Cosmos fuzzing
By Gustavo Grieco Cosmos is a platform enabling the creation of blockchains in Go (or other languages). Its reference implementation, Cosmos SDK, leverages strong fuzz testing extensively, following two approaches: smart fuzzing for low-level code, and dumb fuzzing for high-level simulation. In this blog post, we explain the differences between ... Read More
Chaos Communication Congress (37C3) recap
Last month, two of our engineers attended the 37th Chaos Communication Congress (37C3) in Hamburg, joining thousands of hackers who gather each year to exchange the latest research and achievements in technology and security. Unlike other tech conferences, this annual gathering focuses on the interaction of technology and society, covering ... Read More
Introducing DIFFER, a new tool for testing and validating transformed programs
By Michael Brown We recently released a new differential testing tool, called DIFFER, for finding bugs and soundness violations in transformed programs. DIFFER combines elements from differential, regression, and fuzz testing to help users find bugs in programs that have been altered by software rewriting, debloating, and hardening tools. We ... Read More
Enhancing trust for SGX enclaves
By Artur Cygan Creating reproducible builds for SGX enclaves used in privacy-oriented deployments is a difficult task that lacks a convenient and robust solution. We propose using Nix to achieve reproducible and transparent enclave builds so that anyone can audit whether the enclave is running the source code it claims, ... Read More
We build X.509 chains so you don’t have to
By William Woodruff For the past eight months, Trail of Bits has worked with the Python Cryptographic Authority to build cryptography-x509-verification, a brand-new, pure-Rust implementation of the X.509 path validation algorithm that TLS and other encryption and authentication protocols are built on. Our implementation is fast, standards-conforming, and memory-safe, giving ... Read More
Celebrating our 2023 open-source contributions
At Trail of Bits, we pride ourselves on making our best tools open source, such as Slither, PolyTracker, and RPC Investigator. But while this post is about open source, it’s not about our tools… In 2023, our employees submitted over 450 pull requests (PRs) that were merged into non-Trail of ... Read More
Our thoughts on AIxCC’s competition format
By Michael Brown Late last month, DARPA officially opened registration for their AI Cyber Challenge (AIxCC). As part of the festivities, DARPA also released some highly anticipated information about the competition: a request for comments (RFC) that contained a sample challenge problem and the scoring methodology. Prior rules documents and ... Read More
30 new Semgrep rules: Ansible, Java, Kotlin, shell scripts, and more
By Matt Schwager and Sam Alws We are publishing a set of 30 custom Semgrep rules for Ansible playbooks, Java/Kotlin code, shell scripts, and Docker Compose configuration files. These rules were created and used to audit for common security vulnerabilities in the listed technologies. This new release of our Semgrep ... Read More
LeftoverLocals: Listening to LLM responses through leaked GPU local memory
By Tyler Sorensen and Heidy Khlaaf We are disclosing LeftoverLocals: a vulnerability that allows recovery of data from GPU local memory created by another process on Apple, Qualcomm, AMD, and Imagination GPUs. LeftoverLocals impacts the security posture of GPU applications as a whole, with particular significance to LLMs and ML ... Read More
Internet freedom with the Open Technology Fund
By Spencer Michaels, William Woodruff, Jeff Braswell, and Cliff Smith Trail of Bits cares about internet freedom, and one of our most valued partners in pursuit of that goal is the Open Technology Fund (OTF). Our core values involve focusing on high-impact work, including work with a positive social impact ... Read More
