Dailydave mailing list archives
The difference between block-based fuzzing and AFL
From: Dave Aitel <dave.aitel () gmail com>
Date: Tue, 13 Sep 2016 15:33:41 +0000
So let's take a quick break from thinking about how messed up Wassenaar is or what random annoying thing the EFF or ACLU said about 0day today and talk about fuzzers. AFL has everyone's mind share, but I you have to point out that it is still a VERY specialized tool. The process of taking a file, sending it into some processing unit, and then figuring out if it crashes, sounds easy and generic. But in practice you have to carefully optimize how you do it to get any kind of speed and effectiveness out of it. This is another thing about the Cyber Grand Challenge: I think they optimized the problem set in a way using that limited system call VM for AFL-like fuzzers. I'm just going to assume none of the problem sets were a complex RPC-like protocol, because we would have seen zero people solve them and DARPA knows that. What I mean is this: It is very hard to optimize the block-based fuzzing technique for automation. But they solve two completely different types of problems. AFL-like fuzzers excel at files for one reason: Files don't do computation. SPIKE-like fuzzers excel at protocols because they are there to handle challenge responses, size-fields, checksums, encryption, and other things common in network protocols. There's also minor differences in how they handle mutation. And of course, in many cases a SPIKE-like fuzzer is EASIER to set up and use than something like AFL, with less problem-optimization needed for valuable results. But still, no comparison of a file-fuzzer to a block-based or protocol fuzzer (PEACH/SPIKE/CODENOMICON) is going to be apples to apples. It's more like apples to dragons. -dave
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Current thread:
- The difference between block-based fuzzing and AFL Dave Aitel (Sep 13)
- Re: The difference between block-based fuzzing and AFL Andrew Ruef (Sep 13)
- Re: The difference between block-based fuzzing and AFL Ryan Stortz (Sep 13)
- Re: The difference between block-based fuzzing and AFL Michal Zalewski (Sep 15)