Patrick Jauernig (Technical University of Darmstadt), Domagoj Jakobovic (University of Zagreb, Croatia), Stjepan Picek (Radboud University and TU Delft), Emmanuel Stapf (Technical University of Darmstadt), Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi (Technical University of Darmstadt)

Fuzzing is an automated software testing technique broadly adopted by the industry. A popular variant is mutation-based fuzzing, which discovers a large number of bugs in practice. While the research community has studied mutation-based fuzzing for years now, the algorithms' interactions within the fuzzer are highly complex and can, together with the randomness in every instance of a fuzzer, lead to unpredictable effects. Most efforts to improve this fragile interaction focused on optimizing seed scheduling. However, real-world results like Google's FuzzBench highlight that these approaches do not consistently show improvements in practice. Another approach to improve the fuzzing process algorithmically is optimizing mutation scheduling. Unfortunately, existing mutation scheduling approaches also failed to convince because of missing real-world improvements or too many user-controlled parameters whose configuration requires expert knowledge about the target program. This leaves the challenging problem of cleverly processing test cases and achieving a measurable improvement unsolved. We present DARWIN, a novel mutation scheduler and the first to show fuzzing improvements in a realistic scenario without the need to introduce additional user-configurable parameters, opening this approach to the broad fuzzing community. DARWIN uses an Evolution Strategy to systematically optimize and adapt the probability distribution of the mutation operators during fuzzing. We implemented a prototype based on the popular general-purpose fuzzer AFL. DARWIN significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art mutation scheduler and the AFL baseline in our own coverage experiment, in FuzzBench, and by finding 15 out of 21 bugs the fastest in the MAGMA benchmark. Finally, DARWIN found 20 unique bugs (including one novel bug), 66% more than AFL, in widely-used real-world applications.

View More Papers

Sometimes, You Aren’t What You Do: Mimicry Attacks against...

Akul Goyal (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Xueyuan Han (Wake Forest University), Gang Wang (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Adam Bates (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

Read More

Lightning Community Shout-Outs to:

(1) Jonathan Petit, Secure ML Performance Benchmark (Qualcomm) (2) David Balenson, The Road to Future Automotive Research Datasets: PIVOT Project and Community Workshop (USC Information Sciences Institute) (3) Jeremy Daily, CyberX Challenge Events (Colorado State University) (4) Mert D. Pesé, DETROIT: Data Collection, Translation and Sharing for Rapid Vehicular App Development (Clemson University) (5) Ning…

Read More

Location Spoofing Attacks on Autonomous Fleets

Jinghan Yang, Andew Estornell, Yevgeniy Vorobeychik (Washington University in St. Louis)

Read More

The evolution of program analysis approaches in the era...

Alex Matrosov (CEO and Founder of Binarly Inc.)

Read More