Compilers
High-fidelity build instrumentation with blight
TL;DR: We’re open-sourcing a new framework, blight, for painlessly wrapping and instrumenting C and C++ build tools. We’re already using it on our research projects, and have included a set of useful ...
Breaking the Solidity Compiler with a Fuzzer
Over the last few months, we’ve been fuzzing solc, the standard Solidity smart contract compiler, and we’ve racked up almost 20 (now mostly fixed) new bugs. A few of these are duplicates ...
Security assessment techniques for Go projects
The Trail of Bits Assurance practice has received an influx of Go projects, following the success of our Kubernetes assessment this summer. As a result, we’ve been adapting for Go projects some ...
Zero-Day Snafus — Hunting Memory Allocation Bugs
Zero-Day Snafus — Hunting Memory Allocation BugsPrefaceLanguages like C/C++ come with the whole “allocation party” of malloc, calloc, zalloc, realloc and their specialized versions kmalloc etc. For example, malloc has a signature void *malloc(size_t ...
Use constexpr for faster, smaller, and safer code
With the release of C++14, the standards committee strengthened one of the coolest modern features of C++: constexpr. Now, C++ developers can write constant expressions and force their evaluation at compile-time, rather ...
Creating an LLVM Sanitizer from Hopes and Dreams
Each year, Trail of Bits runs a month-long winter internship aka “winternship” program. This year we were happy to host 4 winterns who contributed to 3 projects. This project comes from Carson ...
Leaves of Hash
Trail of Bits has released Indurative, a cryptographic library that enables authentication of a wide variety of data structures without requiring users to write much code. Indurative is useful for everything from ...
How McSema Handles C++ Exceptions
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 ...
Protecting Software Against Exploitation with DARPA’s CFAR
Today, we’re going to talk about a hard problem that we are working on as part of DARPA’s Cyber Fault-Tolerant Attack Recovery (CFAR) program: automatically protecting software from 0-day exploits, memory corruption, ...
An accessible overview of Meltdown and Spectre, Part 2
This is the second half of our blog post on the Meltdown an Spectre vulnerabilities, describing Spectre Variant 1 (V1) and Spectre Variant 2 (V2). If you have not done so already, ...
