Title
SmartSeed: Smart Seed Generation for Efficient Fuzzing.
Abstract
Fuzzing is an automated application vulnerability detection method. For genetic algorithm-based fuzzing, it can mutate the seed files provided by users to obtain a number of inputs, which are then used to test the objective application in order to trigger potential crashes. As shown in existing literature, the seed file selection is crucial for the efficiency of fuzzing. However, current seed selection strategies do not seem to be better than randomly picking seed files. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel and generic system, named SmartSeed, to generate seed files towards efficient fuzzing. Specifically, SmartSeed is designed based on a machine learning model to learn and generate high-value binary seeds. We evaluate SmartSeed along with American Fuzzy Lop (AFL) on 12 open-source applications with the input formats of mp3, bmp or flv. We also combine SmartSeed with different fuzzing tools to examine its compatibility. From extensive experiments, we find that SmartSeed has the following advantages: First, it only requires tens of seconds to generate sufficient high-value seeds. Second, it can generate seeds with multiple kinds of input formats and significantly improves the fuzzing performance for most applications with the same input format. Third, SmartSeed is compatible to different fuzzing tools. In total, our system discovers more than twice unique crashes and 5,040 extra unique paths than the existing best seed selection strategy for the evaluated 12 applications. From the crashes found by SmartSeed, we discover 16 new vulnerabilities and have received their CVE IDs.
Year
Venue
Field
2018
arXiv: Cryptography and Security
Fuzz testing,Computer science,Fuzzy logic,Theoretical computer science,Artificial intelligence,Genetic algorithm,Machine learning,Binary number,Vulnerability detection
DocType
Volume
Citations 
Journal
abs/1807.02606
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Chenyang Lv100.68
Shouling Ji261656.91
Yuwei Li3164.08
Junfeng Zhou4225.46
Jianhai Chen514016.34
Pan Zhou638262.71
Jing Chen731.38