Bachelor- and Master-Seminar

Dear All,

the next seminar takes place on 17.2. at 14:30.

Session A 14:30:
Pit Jost

https://cispa-de.zoom.us/j/96786205841?pwd=M3FOQ3dSczRabDNLb3F1czVXVUpvdz09

Meeting-ID: 967 8620 5841
Kenncode: BT!u5=

 

Session A:

14:00-14:30 

No talk this week.

14:30-15:00

Speaker: Pit Jost
Type of talk: Bachelor Intro Talk
Advisor: Prof. Dr. Andreas Zeller
Supervisor: Dr. Rafael Dutra
Title: Automated generation of format-aware Fuzzers using FormatFuzzer

Abstract: Fuzzing is an automated testing technique used to execute computer programs with a high number of automatically generated, often ill-formed inputs in order to trigger unexpected behavior such as hangs, crashes or undesired outputs which can be a sign for the presence of vulnerabilities that can be exploited. As file formats tend to be very complex, programs often validate the structure of their inputs at an early parsing stage. Randomly generated files will likely not match the expected structure, thus are discarded during this early stage. Due to this, purely random fuzzing only reaches low code coverage, making it inefficient.

In this thesis, the novel fuzzing technique FormatFuzzer is used. FormatFuzzer uses a structure-aware approach that works by compiling descriptions of binary file formats, referred to as binary templates, into executables that can be used to parse, generate and mutate binary files compliant to their respective format specifications. These binary templates contain all information required to generate and parse structurally valid files of a given format. The files generated by FormatFuzzer are expected to perform better than conventional fuzzing approaches, as due to their structure-awareness, the files are most likely to pass the parsing stage of a given program, thus reaching higher code coverage.

The main focus in this thesis will be on developing reliable binary templates in order to support formats for which no binary templates optimized for generation with FormatFuzzer exist. As a starting point, existing templates made publicly available by 010 Editor are used. These templates work fine for parsing, but are not intended for file generation, as they are missing important information about specific values that need to be present at specific positions in the generated files in order for them to be valid, such as magic bytes. To tackle this issue, this information is added to the existing templates. Furthermore, the process of developing binary templates will be facilitated for future work by the introduction of new features into the binary template language, by automating parts of the process or by using new procedures. The efficiency of the resulting templates will finally be evaluated, and the results will be compared with related work.

 

 

15:00-15:30

No talk this week.