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1. Rare Path Guided Fuzzing

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3597926.3598136  

   Saha, Seemanta; Sarker, Laboni; Shafiuzzaman, Md; Shou, Chaofan; Li, Albert; Sankaran, Ganesh; Bultan, Tevfik (July 2023, Proceedings of the 32nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis, ISSTA 2023)

   Just, René; Fraser, Gordon (Ed.)

   Starting with a random initial seed, fuzzers search for inputs that trigger bugs or vulnerabilities. However, fuzzers often fail to generate inputs for program paths guarded by restrictive branch conditions. In this paper, we show that by first identifying rare-paths in programs (i.e., program paths with path constraints that are unlikely to be satisfied by random input generation), and then, generating inputs/seeds that trigger rare-paths, one can improve the coverage of fuzzing tools. In particular, we present techniques 1) that identify rare paths using quantitative symbolic analysis, and 2) generate inputs that can explore these rare paths using path-guided concolic execution. We provide these inputs as initial seed sets to three state of the art fuzzers. Our experimental evaluation on a set of programs shows that the fuzzers achieve better coverage with the rare-path based seed set compared to a random initial seed. 

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2. Evaluating Synthetic Bugs

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3433210.3453096  

   Bundt, Joshua; Fasano, Andrew; Dolan-Gavitt, Brendan; Robertson, William; Leek, Tim (May 2021, ASIA CCS '21: Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security)

   null (Ed.)

   Fuzz testing has been used to find bugs in programs since the 1990s, but despite decades of dedicated research, there is still no consensus on which fuzzing techniques work best. One reason for this is the paucity of ground truth: bugs in real programs with known root causes and triggering inputs are difficult to collect at a meaningful scale. Bug injection technologies that add synthetic bugs into real programs seem to offer a solution, but the differences in finding these synthetic bugs versus organic bugs have not previously been explored at a large scale. Using over 80 years of CPU time, we ran eight fuzzers across 20 targets from the Rode0day bug-finding competition and the LAVA-M corpus. Experiments were standardized with respect to compute resources and metrics gathered. These experiments show differences in fuzzer performance as well as the impact of various configuration options. For instance, it is clear that integrating symbolic execution with mutational fuzzing is very effective and that using dictionaries improves performance. Other conclusions are less clear-cut; for example, no one fuzzer beat all others on all tests. It is noteworthy that no fuzzer found any organic bugs (i.e., one reported in a CVE), despite 50 such bugs being available for discovery in the fuzzing corpus. A close analysis of results revealed a possible explanation: a dramatic difference between where synthetic and organic bugs live with respect to the "main path" discovered by fuzzers. We find that recent updates to bug injection systems have made synthetic bugs more difficult to discover, but they are still significantly easier to find than organic bugs in our target programs. Finally, this study identifies flaws in bug injection techniques and suggests a number of axes along which synthetic bugs should be improved. 

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3. Snowplow: Effective Kernel Fuzzing with a Learned White-box Test Mutator

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3676641.3716019  

   Gong, Sishuai; Rui, Wang; Altinbüken, Deniz; Fonseca, Pedro; Maniatis, Petros (March 2025, ACM)

   Kernel fuzzers rely heavily on program mutation to automatically generate new test programs based on existing ones. In particular, program mutation can alter the test's control and data flow inside the kernel by inserting new system calls, changing the values of call arguments, or performing other program mutations. However, due to the complexity of the kernel code and its user-space interface, finding the effective mutation that can lead to the desired outcome such as increasing the coverage and reaching a target code location is extremely difficult, even with the widespread use of manually-crafted heuristics. This work proposes Snowplow, a kernel fuzzer that uses a learned white-box test mutator to enhance test mutation. The core of Snowplow is an efficient machine learning model that can learn to predict promising mutations given the test program to mutate, its kernel code coverage, and the desired coverage. Snowplow is demonstrated on argument mutations of the kernel tests, and evaluated on recent Linux kernel releases. When fuzzing the kernels for 24 hours, Snowplow shows a significant speedup of discovering new coverage (4.8x~5.2x) and achieves higher overall coverage (7.0%~8.6%). In a 7-day fuzzing campaign, Snowplow discovers 86 previously-unknown crashes. Furthermore, the learned mutator is shown to accelerate directed kernel fuzzing by reaching 19 target code locations 8.5x faster and two additional locations that are missed by the state-of-the-art directed kernel fuzzer. 

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4. Graphics Card Based Fuzzing

   https://doi.org/10.1109/MASSW.2019.00029  

   Mower, Ryan; Bernard, Ben; Straub, Jeremy (November 2019, Proceedings of the 2019 IEEE 16th International Conference on Mobile Ad Hoc and Sensor Systems Workshops (MASSW))

   Fuzzing is the art of creating data and using that generated data as input for a target program. The goal behind this is to crash the program in a manner that can be analyzed and exploited. Software developers are able to benefit from fuzzers, as they can patch the discovered vulnerabilities before an attacker exploits them. Programs are becoming larger and require improved fuzzers to keep up with the increased attack surface. Most innovations in fuzzer development are software related and provide better path coverage or data generation. This paper proposes creating a fuzzer that is designed to utilize a dedicated graphics card's graphics processing unit (GPU) instead of the standard processor. Much of the code within the fuzzer is parallelizable, meaning the graphics card could potentially process it in a much more efficient manner. The effectiveness of GPU fuzzing is assessed herein. © 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. 

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5. One Fuzzing Strategy to Rule Them All

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3510003.3510174  

   Wu, Mingyuan; Jiang, Ling; Xiang, Jiahong; Huang, Yanwei; Cui, Heming; Zhang, Lingming; Zhang, Yuqun (April 2022, Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Engineering)

   Coverage-guided fuzzing has become mainstream in fuzzing to automatically expose program vulnerabilities. Recently, a group of fuzzers are proposed to adopt a random search mechanism namely Havoc, explicitly or implicitly, to augment their edge exploration. However, they only tend to adopt the default setup of Havoc as an implementation option while none of them attempts to explore its power under diverse setups or inspect its rationale for potential improvement. In this paper, to address such issues, we conduct the first empirical study on Havoc to enhance the understanding of its characteristics. Specifically, we first find that applying the default setup of Havoc to fuzzers can significantly improve their edge coverage performance. Interestingly, we further observe that even simply executing Havoc itself without appending it to any fuzzer can lead to strong edge coverage performance and outperform most of our studied fuzzers. Moreover, we also extend the execution time of Havoc and find that most fuzzers can not only achieve significantly higher edge coverage, but also tend to perform similarly (i.e., their performance gaps get largely bridged). Inspired by the findings, we further propose Havoc𝑀𝐴𝐵, which models the Havoc mutation strategy as a multi-armed bandit problem to be solved by dynamically adjusting the mutation strategy. The evaluation result presents that Havoc𝑀𝐴𝐵 can significantly increase the edge coverage by 11.1% on average for all the benchmark projects compared with Havoc and even slightly outperform state-of-the-art QSYM which augments its computing resource by adopting three parallel threads. We further execute Havoc𝑀𝐴𝐵 with three parallel threads and result in 9% higher average edge coverage over QSYM upon all the benchmark projects 

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