Latest threat reports & articles

trail_of_bits · tlp:amber · 7/2/2026, 11:00:00 AM

Field reports from Patch the Planet 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 models at real codebases, find the security bug…

trail_of_bits · tlp:amber · 6/30/2026, 11:00:00 AM

Shipping post-quantum cryptography to Python 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 post-quantum cryptography. The order says l…

trail_of_bits · tlp:amber · 6/22/2026, 4:50:00 PM

Introducing Patch the Planet 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 19 projects (with many more still undergoing coor…

trail_of_bits · tlp:amber · 6/12/2026, 11:00:00 AM

Factoring "short-sleeve" RSA keys with polynomials 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 many of these keys and anal…

trail_of_bits · tlp:amber · 6/3/2026, 11:00:00 AM

The sorry state of skill distribution 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 skill scanner , and all three of the scanners…

trail_of_bits · tlp:amber · 5/22/2026, 11:00:00 AM

We hardened zizmor's GitHub Actions static analyzer 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. When GitHub Actions added s…

trail_of_bits · tlp:amber · 5/12/2026, 11:00:00 AM

Go fuzzing was missing half the toolkit. We forked the toolchain to fix it. 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 gos…

trail_of_bits · tlp:amber · 5/5/2026, 11:00:00 AM

C/C++ checklist challenges, solved 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 how the Windows registry type confusion esc…

trail_of_bits · tlp:amber · 4/29/2026, 11:00:00 AM

Extending Ruzzy with LibAFL 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 gives Ruby developers and security researchers access t…

trail_of_bits · tlp:amber · 4/23/2026, 12:00:00 PM

Trailmark turns code into graphs 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.” John Lambert’s widely cited observation abo…

trail_of_bits · tlp:amber · 4/17/2026, 11:00:00 AM

We beat Google’s zero-knowledge proof of quantum cryptanalysis 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 breakthrough, but rather t…

trail_of_bits · tlp:amber · 4/9/2026, 11:00:00 AM

Master C and C++ with our new Testing Handbook chapter 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 manual code review. LLM ent…

trail_of_bits · tlp:amber · 4/7/2026, 11:00:00 AM

What we learned about TEE security from auditing WhatsApp's Private Inference 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 now-…

trail_of_bits · tlp:amber · 4/3/2026, 11:00:00 AM

Simplifying MBA obfuscation with CoBRA 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 open-source tool that simplifies the fu…

trail_of_bits · tlp:amber · 4/1/2026, 11:00:00 AM

Mutation testing for the agentic era Code coverage is one of the most dangerous quality metrics in software testing. Many developers fail to realize that code coverage lies by omission: it measures execution, not verification. Test suites with high coverage can obfuscate the fact that critical functionality is untested as software develops over time. We saw this when mutation testing uncovered a high-severity Arkis protocol vulnerability , overlooked by coverage metrics, tha…

trail_of_bits · tlp:amber · 3/31/2026, 11:00:00 AM

How we made Trail of Bits AI-native (so far) This post is adapted from a talk I gave at [un]prompted , the AI security practitioner conference. Thanks to Gadi Evron for inviting me to speak. You can watch the recorded presentation below or download the slides . Most companies hand out ChatGPT licenses and wait for the productivity numbers to move. We built a system instead. A year ago, about 5% of Trail of Bits was on board with our AI initiative. The other 95% ranged from p…

trail_of_bits · tlp:amber · 3/25/2026, 11:00:00 AM

Try our new dimensional analysis Claude plugin We’re releasing a new Claude plugin for developing and auditing code that implements dimensional analysis, a technique we explored in our most recent blog post . Most LLM-based security skills ask the model to find bugs. Our new dimensional-analysis plugin for Claude Code takes a different approach: it uses the LLM to annotate your codebase with dimensional types, then flags mismatches mechanically. In testing against real audit…

trail_of_bits · tlp:amber · 3/24/2026, 11:00:00 AM

Spotting issues in DeFi with dimensional analysis Using dimensional analysis, you can categorically rule out a whole category of logic and arithmetic bugs that plague DeFi formulas. No code changes required, just better reasoning! One of the first lessons in physics is learning to think in terms of dimensions . Physicists can often spot a flawed formula in seconds just by checking whether the dimensions make sense. I once had a teacher who even kept a stamp that said “non-ho…

trail_of_bits · tlp:amber · 3/11/2026, 11:00:00 AM

Six mistakes in ERC-4337 smart accounts Account abstraction transforms fixed “private key can do anything” models into programmable systems that enable batching, recovery and spending limits, and flexible gas payment. But that programmability introduces risks: a single bug can be as catastrophic as leaking a private key. After auditing dozens of ERC‑4337 smart accounts, we’ve identified six vulnerability patterns that frequently appear. By the end of this post, you’ll be abl…

trail_of_bits · tlp:amber · 2/25/2026, 12:00:00 PM

mquire: Linux memory forensics without external dependencies If you’ve ever done Linux memory forensics, you know the frustration: without debug symbols that match the exact kernel version, you’re stuck. These symbols aren’t typically installed on production systems and must be sourced from external repositories, which quickly become outdated when systems receive updates. If you’ve ever tried to analyze a memory dump only to discover that no one has published symbols for tha…

trail_of_bits · tlp:amber · 2/20/2026, 4:00:00 PM

Using threat modeling and prompt injection to audit Comet Before launching their Comet browser, Perplexity hired us to test the security of their AI-powered browsing features. Using adversarial testing guided by our TRAIL threat model, we demonstrated how four prompt injection techniques could extract users’ private information from Gmail by exploiting the browser’s AI assistant. The vulnerabilities we found reflect how AI agents behave when external content isn’…

trail_of_bits · tlp:amber · 2/18/2026, 12:00:00 PM

Carelessness versus craftsmanship in cryptography Two popular AES libraries, aes-js and pyaes, “helpfully” provide a default IV in their AES-CTR API, leading to a large number of key/IV reuse bugs. These bugs potentially affect thousands of downstream projects. When we shared one of these bugs with an affected vendor, strongSwan, the maintainer provided a model response for security vendors. The aes-js/pyaes maintainer, on the other hand, has taken a more… cavalier approach.…

trail_of_bits · tlp:amber · 1/30/2026, 12:00:00 PM

Celebrating our 2025 open-source contributions Last year, our engineers submitted over 375 pull requests that were merged into non–Trail of Bits repositories, touching more than 90 projects from cryptography libraries to the Rust compiler. This work reflects one of our driving values: “share what others can use.” The measure isn’t whether you share something, but whether it’s actually useful to someone else. This principle is why we publish handbooks …

trail_of_bits · tlp:amber · 1/29/2026, 12:00:00 PM

Building cryptographic agility into Sigstore Software signatures carry an invisible expiration date. The container image or firmware you sign today might be deployed for 20 years, but the cryptographic signature protecting it may become untrustworthy within 10 years. SHA-1 certificates become worthless, weak RSA keys are banned, and quantum computers may crack today’s elliptic curve cryptography. The question isn’t whether our current signatures will fail, but wh…

trail_of_bits · tlp:amber · 1/13/2026, 12:00:00 PM

Lack of isolation in agentic browsers resurfaces old vulnerabilities With browser-embedded AI agents, we’re essentially starting the security journey over again. We exploited a lack of isolation mechanisms in multiple agentic browsers to perform attacks ranging from the dissemination of false information to cross-site data leaks. These attacks, which are functionally similar to cross-site scripting (XSS) and cross-site request forgery (CSRF), resurface decades-old patt…

trail_of_bits · tlp:amber · 12/31/2025, 12:00:00 PM

Detect Go’s silent arithmetic bugs with go-panikint Go’s arithmetic operations on standard integer types are silent by default, meaning overflows “wrap around” without panicking. This behavior has hidden an entire class of security vulnerabilities from fuzzing campaigns. Today we’re changing that by releasing go-panikint , a modified Go compiler that turns silent integer overflows into explicit panics. We used it to find a live integer overflow in the Cosmos SDK’s RPC pagina…

trail_of_bits · tlp:amber · 12/19/2025, 12:00:00 PM

Can chatbots craft correct code? I recently attended the AI Engineer Code Summit in New York, an invite-only gathering of AI leaders and engineers. One theme emerged repeatedly in conversations with attendees building with AI: the belief that we’re approaching a future where developers will never need to look at code again. When I pressed these proponents, several made a similar argument: Forty years ago, when high-level programming languages like C became increasingly popul…