Title
Optimizing seed selection for fuzzing
Abstract
Randomly mutating well-formed program inputs or simply fuzzing, is a highly effective and widely used strategy to find bugs in software. Other than showing fuzzers find bugs, there has been little systematic effort in understanding the science of how to fuzz properly. In this paper, we focus on how to mathematically formulate and reason about one critical aspect in fuzzing: how best to pick seed files to maximize the total number of bugs found during a fuzz campaign. We design and evaluate six different algorithms using over 650 CPU days on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to provide ground truth data. Overall, we find 240 bugs in 8 applications and show that the choice of algorithm can greatly increase the number of bugs found. We also show that current seed selection strategies as found in Peach may fare no better than picking seeds at random. We make our data set and code publicly available.
Year
Venue
Field
2014
USENIX Security
Data mining,Fuzz testing,Computer security,Computer science,Ground truth,Bebugging,Software,Cloud computing
DocType
Citations 
PageRank 
Conference
27
1.07
References 
Authors
10
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Alexandre Rebert1281.42
Sang Kil Cha254227.02
Thanassis Avgerinos386331.86
Jonathan Foote4271.07
David J. Warren5626.43
Gustavo Grieco6705.08
David Brumley72940142.75