A trail of flipping bits

By Joop van de Pol Trusted execution environments (TEE) such as secure enclaves are becoming more popular to secure assets in the cloud. Their promise is enticing because when enclaves are properly used, even the operator of the enclave or the cloud service should not be able to access those assets. However, this leads to […]

December 18, 2023
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Publishing Trail of Bits’ CodeQL queries

By Paweł Płatek We are publishing a set of custom CodeQL queries for Go and C. We have used them to find critical issues that the standard CodeQL queries would have missed. This new release of a continuously updated repository of CodeQL queries joins our public Semgrep rules and Automated Testing Handbook in an effort […]

December 6, 2023
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New SSH Vulnerability

This is interesting:

For the first time, researchers have demonstrated that a large portion of cryptographic keys used to protect data in computer-to-server SSH traffic are vulnerable to complete compromise when naturally occurring computational errors occur while the connection is being established.

[…]

The vulnerability occurs when there are errors during the signature generation that takes place when a client and server are establishing a connection. It affects only keys using the RSA cryptographic algorithm, which the researchers found in roughly a third of the SSH signatures they examined. That translates to roughly 1 billion signatures out of the 3.2 billion signatures examined. Of the roughly 1 billion RSA signatures, about one in a million exposed the private key of the host…

November 15, 2023
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Adding build provenance to Homebrew

By William Woodruff This is a joint post with Alpha-Omega—read their announcement post as well! We’re starting a new project in collaboration with Alpha-Omega and OpenSSF to improve the transparency and security of Homebrew. This six-month project will bring cryptographically verifiable build provenance to homebrew-core, allowing end users and companies to prove that Homebrew’s packages […]

November 6, 2023
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Bounty to Recover NIST’s Elliptic Curve Seeds

This is a fun challenge:

The NIST elliptic curves that power much of modern cryptography were generated in the late ’90s by hashing seeds provided by the NSA. How were the seeds generated? Rumor has it that they are in turn hashes of English sentences, but the person who picked them, Dr. Jerry Solinas, passed away in early 2023 leaving behind a cryptographic mystery, some conspiracy theories, and an historical password cracking challenge.

So there’s a $12K prize to recover the hash seeds.

Some backstory:

Some of the backstory here (it’s the funniest fucking backstory ever): it’s lately been circulating—though I think this may have been somewhat common knowledge among practitioners, though definitely not to me—that the “random” seeds for the NIST P-curves, generated in the 1990s by Jerry Solinas at NSA, were simply SHA1 hashes of some variation of the string “Give Jerry a raise”…

October 12, 2023
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New Revelations from the Snowden Documents

Jake Appelbaum’s PhD thesis contains several new revelations from the classified NSA documents provided to journalists by Edward Snowden. Nothing major, but a few more tidbits.
Kind of amazing that that all happened ten years ago. At this point, …

September 21, 2023
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