CPUs used to perform better when memory accesses are aligned, that is when the pointer value is a multiple of the alignment value. This differentiation still exists in current CPUs, and still some have only instructions that perform aligned accesses. To take into account this issue, the C standard has alignment rules in place, and so the compilers exploit them to generate efficient code whenever possible. As we will see in this article, we need to be careful while casting pointers around to be sure not to break any of these rules. The goal of this article is to be educative by showcasing the problem and by giving some solutions to easily get over it.

Two engineers from QuarksLab had talks accepted at CppCon this year: two tools presentation, Easy::jit, and Frozen; and a general introduction to the ELF format. It's hard to cope with the 9 hours of jet-lag, but it is definitively worth the effort, so here is our conf report!

In this blog post we compare the post-exploitation process of two jailbreaks for iOS 11.1.2 : LiberiOS and Electra. We start by giving a quick refresher about jailbreaks, and then proceed with the description of their implementation.

This blog post provides the reader with an overview of the Intel SGX technology, as a follow-up to SGX Internals. In this second part, we quickly explain how an application interacts with its enclave. We also detail what pieces of software are included within the SDK and PSW. Finally, we summarize the known attacks and concerns with this technology, as well as conclude on the subject.

An overview of the TrustZone was given in a previous article. This second article more technically addresses the attack surface and hotspots exposed to an attacker, as well as what can be done once code execution is achieved in the different privilege levels available in TrustZone.

Earlier this year, on March 2018, we published a blog post detailing 2 vulnerabilities in the Android Bluetooth stack, which were independently discovered by Quarkslab, but were fixed in the March 2018 Android Security Bulletin while we were in the process of reporting them to Google.

This micro blog post introduces our research regarding symbolic deobfuscation of virtualized hash functions in collaboration with the CEA and VERIMAG.

Easy::jit is a library that brings just-in-time compilation to C++ codes. It allows developers to jit-compile some functions and specializing (part of) their parameters. Just-in-time compilation is done on-demand and controlled by the developer. The project is available on github .

This blog-post provides the reader with an overview of the Intel SGX technology. In this first part, we explore the additions made to Intel platforms to support SGX, focusing on the processor and memory. We then explain the management and life cycle of an enclave. Finally, we detail two features of enclaves: secret sealing and attestation.

This year has been very fruitful for Quarkslab with lots of research, new challenges, newcomers, open source success. It is now a tradition to look back at what we have done during a small conference named “Quarks in the Shell” or just "QITS", where we share the year experience with our customers, partners and friends. QITS meeting is one of the output channels for our research work that is also reflected in internal tools, our open-source projects (e.g. Triton, LIEF and QDBI), and our products (IRMA Enterprise and Epona).