Immutable

Trail of Bits

FEATURED VOICES IN THIS EPISODE

Dan Guido

Dan Guido is the CEO of Trail of Bits, a cybersecurity firm he founded in 2012 to address software security challenges with cutting-edge research. In his tenure leading Trail of Bits, Dan has grown the team to 80 engineers, led the team to compete in the DARPA Cyber Grand Challenge, built an industry-leading blockchain security practice, and refined open-source tools for the endpoint security market. In addition to his work at Trail of Bits, he’s active on the boards of four early-stage technology companies. Dan contributes to cybersecurity policy papers from RAND, CNAS, and Harvard. He runs Empire Hacking, a 1,500-member meetup group focused on NYC-area cybersecurity professionals. His latest hobby coding project -- AlgoVPN -- is the Internet's most recommended self-hosted VPN. In prior roles, Dan taught a capstone course on software exploitation at NYU as a faculty member and the Hacker in Residence, consulted at iSEC Partners (now NCC Group), and worked as an incident responder for the Federal Reserve System.

Evan Sultanik

Evan Sultanik is a Principal Computer Security Researcher at Trail of Bits. A computer scientist with extensive experience both in industry (as a software engineer) and academia, Evan is an active contributor to open source software. He is author of more than two dozen peer-reviewed academic papers, and is particularly interested in intelligent, distributed/peer-to-peer systems. Evan is editor of and frequent contributor to the International Journal of PoC||GTFO.

Trent Brunson

Trent is a Principal Security Engineer and Research Practice Manager at Trail of Bits. He has worked in computer security since 2012 as a researcher and engineer at Assured Information Security in Rome, NY, and at the Georgia Tech Research Institute, where he served as the Threat Intelligence Branch Chief and the Associate Division Chief of Threat Intelligence & Analytics. Trent received his Ph.D. in computational physics from Emory University in Atlanta in 2014, and his dissertation work applied the renormalization group and Monte Carlo methods to study exact results on complex networks.

Host: Nick Selby

An accomplished information and physical security professional, Nick leads the Software Assurance practice at Trail of Bits, giving customers at some of the world's most targeted companies a comprehensive understanding of their security landscape. He is the creator of the Trail of Bits podcast, and does everything from writing scripts to conducting interviews to audio engineering to Foley (e.g. biting into pickles). Prior to Trail of Bits, Nick was Director of Cyber Intelligence and Investigations at the NYPD; the CSO of a blockchain startup; and VP of Operations at an industry analysis firm.

Production Staff

Story Editor: Chris Julin
Associate Editor: Emily Haavik
Executive Producer: Nick Selby
Executive Producer: Dan Guido

Recording

Rocky Hill Studios, Ghent, New York. Nick Selby, Engineer
Preuss-Projekt Tonstudio, Salzburg, Austria. Christian Höll, Engineer
Remote recordings: Whistler, BC (Nick Selby); Queens, NY (Emily Haavik)

Edited and Mastered by Chris Julin
Trail of Bits supports and adheres to the Tape Syncers United Fair Rates Card

Video

Watch a video of this podcast.

Music

Dispatches From Technology's Future, the Trail of Bits theme, Chris Julin
CANTO DELLE SCIACALLE, Cesare Pastanella
SHALLOW WATER - REMIX, Omri Smadar, Yehezkel Raz, Sivan Talmor
ALL IN YOUR STRIDE, ABE
LET IT RISE, Divine Attraction
ROAD LESS TRAVELED, The David Roy Collective
KILLING ME SOFTLY, Ty Simon
TECH TALK, Rex Banner
LOST ON EARTH, Marek Jakubowicz
SCAPES, Gray North

Reproduction

With the exception of any Copyrighted music herein, Trail of Bits Season 1 Episode 0; Immutable © 2022 by Trail of Bits is licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International. This license allows reuse: reusers may copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form and for noncommercial purposes only (noncommercial means not primarily intended for or directed towards commercial advantage or monetary compensation), provided that reusers give credit to Trail of Bits as the creator. No derivatives or adaptations of this work are permitted. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.

Referenced in this Episode

In “Are Blockchains Decentralized? Unintended Centralities in Distributed Ledgers,” Evan Sultanik, Trent Brunson, and nine other engineers on the Trail of Bits Research and Engineering and Software Assurance teams report their findings from the year-long project to examine Blockchain centrality.

Fluxture is a free and open source software crawling framework for Blockchains and peer-to-peer systems that Trail of Bits created to assist with the work described in this episode. We also link to the free and open source recursive dependency graphing tool It-Depends, which we will discuss in depth in the upcoming podcast episode that’s creatively titled, It-Depends.

The Are Blockchains Decentralized? Unintended Centralities in Distributed Ledgers paper cites more than 30 academic and commercial research papers.

There is literature about how malicious Tor exit nodes surveil and inject attacks into Tor-users’ traffic. You may also read comments about exit node manipulation by Tor network maintainers. One report states that On February 2, 2021, a single, malicious actor was able to fully manage 27 percent of Tor's exit capacity.

The reports “How Malicious Tor Relays are Exploiting Users in 2020 (Part I)" hypothesized that the entity behind a range of malicious tor relays would not to stop its activities anytime soon; the follow-up, "Tracking One Year of Malicious Tor Exit Relay Activities" continues the discussion.

Meet the Team:

CHRIS JULIN

Chris Julin has spent years telling audio stories and helping other people tell theirs. These days he works as a story editor and producer for news outlets like APM Reports, West Virginia Public Broadcasting, and Marketplace. He has also taught and mentored hundreds of young journalists as a professor. For the Trail of Bits podcast, he serves as story and music editor, sound designer, and mixing and mastering engineer.

EMILY HAAVIK

For the past 10 years Emily Haavik has worked as a broadcast journalist in radio, television, and digital media. She’s spent time writing, reporting, covering courts, producing investigative podcasts, and serving as an editorial manager. She now works as an audio producer for several production shops including Us & Them from West Virginia Public Broadcasting and PRX, and APM Reports. For the Trail of Bits podcast, she helps with scripting, interviews, story concepts, and audio production.