Title:
Fuzzing with Performance Monitoring and Tracing Hardware
Fuzzing with Performance Monitoring and Tracing Hardware
Author(s)
Lopez, Gabriela
Advisor(s)
Saltaformaggio, Brendan D.
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Abstract
The field of fuzzing has brought about many new open-source tools, techniques, and
insights to improve the state of the art of automated vulnerability discovery systems. How-
ever, there are instances where the adoption of such new techniques and tools improves
the state of the art of these systems while at the expense of portability, accessibility, and
performance. Additionally, while many of the processor platforms used in the fuzzing com-
munity already come built with components that observe program execution in the form of
performance monitoring and tracing hardware, such hardware is not commonly used by
fuzzers. On a similar note, there is currently a lack of evaluations for the usage of such
hardware in the fuzzing literature. The most commonly used processor platforms in the
fuzzing community are Intel processors. Our work seeks to evaluate the performance im-
pact in using performance monitoring and tracing hardware (specifically Intel Last Record
Branch sampling and Intel Branch Trace Store) for coverage feedback in coverage-guided
fuzzers. In our evaluation, we seek to learn if the adoption of these specific performance
monitoring and tracing hardware in coverage-guided fuzzers can improve the performance
of binary-only fuzzing.
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Date Issued
2022-04-14
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