Recent content on The Trail of Bits Blog
Every Signal chat starts the same way: the client asks the Signal server for the public key associated with your contact’s phone number. But how do you know the server gave you the right key? A compromised server could provide a false public key, allowing the client to encrypt messages to an attacker rather than the intended recipient. Until now, the only way to detect such malfeasance was to…
Nitro Enclaves and Key Management Service (KMS) feel like a natural fit: since the KMS can verify attestation documents generated by the enclaves, developers can offload key management tasks from their applications to the AWS-managed service. But integrating an external service with your trusted enclaves comes with new threats, even if that service comes from the same provider. In this blog…
Uniswap v4 hooks let developers add custom behavior to pools, including dynamic fees, custom accounting, and external integrations. This flexibility moves some security responsibilities into application and hook code. The Cork and Bunni exploits are two app-level incidents that show what can go wrong in that code. Together, they account for more than $20M in losses. Neither incident stemmed from a…
Codex’s /goal feature amplifies bug hunting, but getting good results requires the right prompt, the right scope, and the right number of outcomes per run. For Patch the Planet , our joint initiative with OpenAI to find and fix bugs in open-source software, we pointed Codex at some of the most widely used, heavily audited codebases in the world, like Rust, curl, and zlib. One tool came up again…
We’ve added a new chapter to our Testing Handbook : a comprehensive guide to security testing Rust programs. This chapter covers the tools and techniques we use at Trail of Bits to validate the security of Rust programs and systems. fn main () {( | f: & dyn Fn ( u128 )-> Box < dyn Iterator < Item = char >+ 'static >| f( * [ & ( 0x7B736D70683F73 u128 << 64 | 0x7A6A6D7C3F7A667D ), & ( 0x7B736D u128…
In April we released Mewt , our open-source mutation-testing engine that finds the gaps in your test suite. Today we’re expanding it with support for DAML, the language Canton Network applications are written in. Mewt now reads DAML, generates several classes of mutants (including two built for DAML’s authorization primitives), and runs them through your existing test suite to count how many…
We’re running Patch the Planet , an ongoing collaboration with OpenAI that pairs Trail of Bits engineers directly with more than 30 open-source projects. Its goal is to front-run a serious problem facing open-source maintainers: highly capable models like GPT-5.5-Cyber will soon create a firehose of bug reports, and OSS maintainers are already spread thin. Our plan is to point OpenAI’s latest…
Post-quantum cryptography is now one pip-install away for the entire Python ecosystem. With funding from the Sovereign Tech Agency , we implemented support for ML-KEM, the NIST-standard key-establishment primitive, and ML-DSA, the NIST-standard digital-signature primitive, in pyca/cryptography . On June 22, 2026, the White House ordered the U.S. government to accelerate its transition to…
What happens when you clear dozens of Trail of Bits engineers’ schedules, pair them with every open-source maintainer they can contact, and unleash the latest frontier models like GPT-5.5-Cyber on critical open-source targets? Thanks to our partnership with OpenAI and its Daybreak initiative, we can report that the impact is hundreds of discovered bugs, 64 pull requests, and 51 issues filed across…
What happens when the bits of an RSA private key are heavily biased toward 0 instead of being randomly generated? The public key’s bits could be biased enough for us to detect these incorrectly generated keys in the wild. Together with Hanno Böck of the badkeys project, we found hundreds of unique keys that not only have this property, but can be quickly factored. We also found the bug that led to…
Public skill marketplaces are being flooded with malicious skills that steal credentials, exfiltrate data, and hijack agents. In response, a segment of the security industry released skill scanners, a new family of tools designed to detect malicious skills before they’re installed. But we tested them, and they don’t work. We recently bypassed ClawHub’s malicious skill detector , Cisco’s agent…
In March 2026, attackers exploited a pull_request_target misconfiguration in the aquasecurity/trivy-action GitHub Action to exfiltrate organization and repository secrets, then used those credentials to backdoor LiteLLM on PyPI (see Trivy’s post-mortem for the full timeline). zizmor is a static analyzer that GitHub Actions users run to catch exactly these misconfigurations before they ship.…
Go’s native fuzzing is useful, but it stands far behind state-of-the-art tooling that the Rust, C, and C++ ecosystems offer with LibAFL and AFL++. Path constraints are hard to solve. Structured inputs usually need handmade parsing. It doesn’t even detect several common bug classes, such as integer overflows, goroutine leaks, data races, and execution timeouts. So to make it better, we built…
We recently added a C/C++ security checklist to the Testing Handbook and challenged readers to spot the bugs in two code samples : a deceptively simple Linux ping program and a Windows driver registry handler. If you found the inet_ntoa global buffer gotcha or the missing RTL_QUERY_REGISTRY_TYPECHECK flag, nice work. If not, here’s a full walkthrough of both challenges, plus a deep dive into…
LibAFL is all the rage in the fuzzing community these days, especially with LLVM’s libFuzzer being placed in maintenance mode . Written in Rust, LibAFL claims improved performance, modularity, state-of-the-art fuzzing techniques, and libFuzzer compatibility . For these reasons, I set out to add LibAFL support to Ruzzy , our coverage-guided fuzzer for pure Ruby code and Ruby C extensions. This…
We’re open-sourcing Trailmark , a library that parses source code into a queryable call graph of functions, classes, call relationships, and semantic metadata, then exposes that graph through a Python API that Claude skills can call directly. Install it now: uv pip install trailmark “Defenders think in lists. Attackers think in graphs. As long as this is true, attackers win.”…
Two weeks ago, Google’s Quantum AI group published a zero-knowledge proof of a quantum circuit so optimized, they concluded that first-generation quantum computers will break elliptic curve cryptography keys in as little as 9 minutes. Today, Trail of Bits is publishing our own zero-knowledge proof that significantly improves Google’s on all metrics. Our result is not due to some quantum…
We added a new chapter to our Testing Handbook: a comprehensive security checklist for C and C++ code . We’ve identified a broad range of common bug classes, known footguns, and API gotchas across C and C++ codebases and organized them into sections covering Linux, Windows, and seccomp. Whereas other handbook chapters focus on static and dynamic analysis, this chapter offers a strong basis for…
WhatsApp’s new “Private Inference” feature represents one of the most ambitious attempts to combine end-to-end encryption with AI-powered capabilities, such as message summarization. To make this possible, Meta built a system that processes encrypted user messages inside trusted execution environments (TEEs), secure hardware enclaves designed so that not even Meta can access the plaintext. Our…
Mixed Boolean-Arithmetic (MBA) obfuscation disguises simple operations like x + y behind tangles of arithmetic and bitwise operators. Malware authors and software protectors rely on it because no standard simplification technique covers both domains simultaneously; algebraic simplifiers don’t understand bitwise logic, and Boolean minimizers can’t handle arithmetic. We’re releasing CoBRA , an…