Work

ClosureX: Compiler Support for Correct Persistent Fuzzing

Year: 2025

Type: conference-paper

Abstract: Fuzzing is a widely adopted and pragmatic methodology for bug hunting as a means of software hardening. Research reveals that increasing fuzzing throughput directly increases bug discovery rate. The highest performance fuzzing strategy is persistent fuzzing, which reuses a single process for all test cases by looping back to the start upon completion, instead of exiting. This eliminates all process creation, initialization, and tear-down costs---which are on-par with execution cost. Unfortunately, persistent fuzzing leads to semantically inconsistent program states because process state changes from one test case remain for subsequent test cases. This semantic inconsistency results in missed crashes, false crashes, and overall incorrectness that undermines fuzzer effectiveness.

Source: ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS)

DOI: 10.1145/3669940.3707281

Authors: Rishi Ranjan, Ian Paterson, Matthew Hicks

Institution: Virginia Tech

Language: English

Topic: Software Testing and Debugging Techniques

Subfield: Software

Field: Computer Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

Open Access status: hybrid

Funders: National Science Foundation, Universitas Brawijaya

Awards: CAREER: Designing and Defending Novel Ultra-stealthy and Controllable Design-time Analog-domain Hardware Trojans, G3187195064