Bernard Nongpoh (Université Paris Saclay), Marwan Nour (Université Paris Saclay), Michaël Marcozzi (Université Paris Saclay), Sébastien Bardin (Université Paris Saclay)

Fuzzing is an effective software testing method that discovers bugs by feeding target applications with (usually a massive amount of) automatically generated inputs. Many state-of-art fuzzers use branch coverage as a feedback metric to guide the fuzzing process. The fuzzer retains inputs for further mutation only if branch coverage is increased. However, branch coverage only provides a shallow sampling of program behaviours and hence may discard inputs that might be interesting to mutate. This work aims at taking advantage of the large body of research over defining finer-grained code coverage metrics (such as mutation coverage) and use these metrics as better proxies to select interesting inputs for mutation. We propose to make coverage-based fuzzers support most fine-grained coverage metrics out of the box (i.e., without changing fuzzer internals). We achieve this by making the test objectives defined by these metrics (such as mutants to kill) explicit as new branches in the target program. Fuzzing such a modified target is then equivalent to fuzzing the original target, but the fuzzer will also retain inputs covering the additional metrics objectives for mutation. We propose a preliminary evaluation of this novel idea using two state-of-art fuzzers, namely AFL++(3.14c) and QSYM with AFL(2.52b), on the four standard LAVA-M benchmarks. Significantly positive results are obtained on one benchmark and marginally negative ones on the three others. We discuss directions towards a strong and complete evaluation of the proposed approach and call for early feedback from the fuzzing community.

View More Papers

Generating Test Suites for GPU Instruction Sets through Mutation...

Shoham Shitrit(University of Rochester) and Sreepathi Pai (University of Rochester)

Read More

Probe the Proto: Measuring Client-Side Prototype Pollution Vulnerabilities of...

Zifeng Kang (Johns Hopkins University), Song Li (Johns Hopkins University), Yinzhi Cao (Johns Hopkins University)

Read More

What Storage? An Empirical Analysis of Web Storage in...

Zubair Ahmad (Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia), Samuele Casarin (Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia), and Stefano Calzavara (Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia)

Read More

FANDEMIC: Firmware Attack Construction and Deployment on Power Management...

Ryan Tsang (University of California, Davis), Doreen Joseph (University of California, Davis), Qiushi Wu (University of California, Davis), Soheil Salehi (University of California, Davis), Nadir Carreon (University of Arizona), Prasant Mohapatra (University of California, Davis), Houman Homayoun (University of California, Davis)

Read More