Andrea Fioraldi (EURECOM), Alessandro Mantovani (EURECOM), Dominik Maier (TU Berlin), Davide Balzarotti (EURECOM)

AFL is one of the most used and extended fuzzing projects, adopted by industry and academic researchers alike. While the community agrees on AFL’s effectiveness at discovering new vulnerabilities and at its outstanding usability, many of its internal design choices remain untested to date. Security practitioners often clone the project “as-is” and use it as a starting point to develop new techniques, usually taking everything under the hood for granted. Instead, we believe that a careful analysis of the different parameters could help modern fuzzers to improve their performance and explain how each choice can affect the outcome of security testing, either negatively or positively.

The goal of this paper is to provide a comprehensive understanding of the internal mechanisms of AFL by performing experiments and comparing different metrics used to evaluate fuzzers. This will prove the efficacy of some patterns and clarify which aspects are instead outdated. To achieve this, we set up nine unique experiments that we carried out on the popular Fuzzbench platform. Each test focuses on a different aspect of AFL, ranging from its mutation approach to the feedback encoding scheme and the scheduling methodologies.

Our preliminary findings show that each design choice affects different factors of AFL. While some of these are positively correlated with the number of detected bugs or the target coverage, other features are related to usability and reliability. Most important, the outcome of our experiments will indicate which parts of AFL we should preserve in modern fuzzers.

View More Papers

Demo #7: A Simulator for Cooperative and Automated Driving...

Mohammed Lamine Bouchouia (Telecom Paris - Institut Polytechnique de Paris), Jean-Philippe Monteuuis (Qualcomm Technologies Inc), Houda Labiod (Telecom Paris - Institut Polytechnique de Paris), Ons Jelassi (Telecom Paris - Institut Polytechnique de Paris), Wafa Ben Jaballah (Thales) and Jonathan Petit (Qualcomm Technologies Inc)

Read More

Fooling the Eyes of Autonomous Vehicles: Robust Physical Adversarial...

Wei Jia (School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology), Zhaojun Lu (School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology), Haichun Zhang (Huazhong University of Science and Technology), Zhenglin Liu (Huazhong University of Science and Technology), Jie Wang (Shenzhen Kaiyuan Internet Security Co., Ltd), Gang Qu (University…

Read More

DrawnApart: A Deep-Learning Enhanced GPU Fingerprinting Technique

Naif Mehanna (University of Lille, CNRS, Inria), Tomer Laor (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev)

Read More

ScriptChecker: To Tame Third-party Script Execution With Task Capabilities

Wu Luo (Peking University), Xuhua Ding (Singapore Management University), Pengfei Wu (School of Computing, National University of Singapore), Xiaolei Zhang (Peking University), Qingni Shen (Peking University), Zhonghai Wu (Peking University)

Read More