Boosting Fuzzer Efficiency: An Information Theoretic Perspective.

This article discusses the concept of fuzzing as a learning process, using Shannon's entropy to quantify the efficiency of a fuzzer in discovering new behaviors of a program. The authors propose an entropy-based power schedule called "Entropic" for greybox fuzzing, assigning more energy to seeds tha...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Publicado en:Communications of the ACM Vol. 66; no. 11; pp. 89 - 98
Autores principales: Böhme, Marcel, Manès, Valentin J. M., Sang Kil Cha
Formato: Artículo
Publicado: Association for Computing Machinery Nov2023
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Acceso en línea:Ver este registro en EBSCOhost
Descripción
Sumario:This article discusses the concept of fuzzing as a learning process, using Shannon's entropy to quantify the efficiency of a fuzzer in discovering new behaviors of a program. The authors propose an entropy-based power schedule called "Entropic" for greybox fuzzing, assigning more energy to seeds that reveal more information about a program's behaviors. This approach is implemented in the popular greybox fuzzer LibFuzzer and has been integrated into Google and Microsoft's fuzzing platforms. The paper highlights that the efficiency of a fuzzer is determined by the average information each generated input reveals about a program's behaviors. The authors conducted experiments with over 250 open-source programs, demonstrating a substantial improvement in efficiency and confirming their hypothesis that an efficient fuzzer maximizes information.