Over the past year, Trail of Bits was engaged by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to investigate the extent to which blockchains are truly decentralized. They focused primarily on the two most popular blockchains: Bitcoin and Ethereum. They also investigated proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchains and Byzantine fault tolerant consensus protocols in general. This report provides a high-level summary of results from the academic literature, as well as their novel research on software centrality and the topology of the Bitcoin consensus network.
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Core Security Technologies Advisory - The VideoLAN (VLC) media player package is vulnerable to an arbitrary memory corruption vulnerability, which can be exploited by malicious remote attackers to compromise a user's system. VLC versions 0.8.6d and below and Miro Player versions 1.1 and below are vulnerable. Proof of concept code included.
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Core Security Technologies Advisory - The MPlayer package is vulnerable to an arbitrary pointer dereference vulnerability, which can be exploited by malicious remote attackers to compromise a user's system. The vulnerability is caused by the MPlayer libmpdemux ('demux_mov.c') library not properly sanitizing certain tags on a MOV file before using them to index an array on the heap. This can be exploited to execute arbitrary commands by opening a specially crafted file.
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