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Rare Path Guided Fuzzing

Authors:

Md Shafiuzzaman,

Ganesh Sankaran,

Tevfik BultanAuthors Info & Claims

ISSTA 2023: Proceedings of the 32nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis

Pages 1295 - 1306

https://doi.org/10.1145/3597926.3598136

Published: 13 July 2023 Publication History

Abstract

Starting with a random initial seed, fuzzers search for inputs that trigger bugs or vulnerabilities. However, fuzzers often fail to generate inputs for program paths guarded by restrictive branch conditions. In this paper, we show that by first identifying rare-paths in programs (i.e., program paths with path constraints that are unlikely to be satisfied by random input generation), and then, generating inputs/seeds that trigger rare-paths, one can improve the coverage of fuzzing tools. In particular, we present techniques 1) that identify rare paths using quantitative symbolic analysis, and 2) generate inputs that can explore these rare paths using path-guided concolic execution. We provide these inputs as initial seed sets to three state of the art fuzzers. Our experimental evaluation on a set of programs shows that the fuzzers achieve better coverage with the rare-path based seed set compared to a random initial seed.

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Cited By

Koffi KKampourakis VKolias CSong JIvans R(2025)Speeding-up fuzzing through directional seedsInternational Journal of Information Security10.1007/s10207-024-00953-624:2Online publication date: 1-Apr-2025
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10207-024-00953-6
St. Amour LTilevich EErtl MKirsch C(2024)Toward Declarative Auditing of Java Software for Graceful Exception HandlingProceedings of the 21st ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Managed Programming Languages and Runtimes10.1145/3679007.3685057(90-97)Online publication date: 13-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3679007.3685057
Chen JYan FCai SWang SChen J(2024)FMUZZ: A Novel Greybox Fuzzing Approach based on Mutation Strategy Optimization with Byte Scheduling2024 IEEE 24th International Conference on Software Quality, Reliability and Security (QRS)10.1109/QRS62785.2024.00061(550-561)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/QRS62785.2024.00061
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Rare Path Guided Fuzzing
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software organization and properties
    1. Extra-functional properties
      1. Software reliability
    2. Software functional properties
      1. Formal methods
        Software verification

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

ISSTA 2023: Proceedings of the 32nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis

July 2023

1554 pages

ISBN:9798400702211

DOI:10.1145/3597926

General Chair:
René Just
University of Washington, USA
,
Program Chair:
Gordon Fraser
University of Passau, Germany

Copyright © 2023 Owner/Author.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

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Published: 13 July 2023

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ISSTA '23

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ISSTA '23: 32nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis

July 17 - 21, 2023

WA, Seattle, USA

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Overall Acceptance Rate 58 of 213 submissions, 27%

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June 25 - 28, 2025

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Cited By

Koffi KKampourakis VKolias CSong JIvans R(2025)Speeding-up fuzzing through directional seedsInternational Journal of Information Security10.1007/s10207-024-00953-624:2Online publication date: 1-Apr-2025
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10207-024-00953-6
St. Amour LTilevich EErtl MKirsch C(2024)Toward Declarative Auditing of Java Software for Graceful Exception HandlingProceedings of the 21st ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Managed Programming Languages and Runtimes10.1145/3679007.3685057(90-97)Online publication date: 13-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3679007.3685057
Chen JYan FCai SWang SChen J(2024)FMUZZ: A Novel Greybox Fuzzing Approach based on Mutation Strategy Optimization with Byte Scheduling2024 IEEE 24th International Conference on Software Quality, Reliability and Security (QRS)10.1109/QRS62785.2024.00061(550-561)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/QRS62785.2024.00061
Li TZong WWang YTian HWang YCheung SKramer J(2023)Nuances are the Key: Unlocking ChatGPT to Find Failure-Inducing Tests with Differential Prompting2023 38th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE)10.1109/ASE56229.2023.00089(14-26)Online publication date: 11-Sep-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/ASE56229.2023.00089

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