TOFU: Target-Oriented FUzzer

Zi Wang; Ben Liblit; Thomas Reps

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arXiv · 2004.14375

TOFU: Target-Oriented FUzzer

Zi Wang·Ben Liblit·Thomas Reps

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Abstract

Program fuzzing---providing randomly constructed inputs to a computer program---has proved to be a powerful way to uncover bugs, find security vulnerabilities, and generate test inputs that increase code coverage. In many applications, however, one is interested in a target-oriented approach-one wants to find an input that causes the program to reach a specific target point in the program. We have created TOFU (for Target-Oriented FUzzer) to address the directed fuzzing problem. TOFU's search is biased according to a distance metric that scores each input according to how close the input's execution trace gets to the target locations. TOFU is also input-structure aware (i.e., the search makes use of a specification of a superset of the program's allowed inputs). Our experiments on xmllint show that TOFU is 28% faster than AFLGo, while reaching 45% more targets. Moreover, both distance-guided search and exploitation of knowledge of the input structure contribute significantly to TOFU's performance.

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Zi Wang, Ben Liblit, Thomas Reps. 2020-04-29. TOFU: Target-Oriented FUzzer. https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.14375

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