Coverage-Guided Learning-Assisted Grammar-Based Fuzzing

Abstract

Grammar-based fuzzing is known to be an effective technique for checking security vulnerabilities in programs, such as parsers, which take complex structured inputs. Unfortunately, most of existing grammar-based fuzzers require a lot of manual efforts of writing complex input grammars, which hinders their practical use. To address this problem, recently proposed approaches use machine learning to automatically acquire a generative model for structured inputs conforming to a complex grammar. Even such approaches, however, have major limitations: they fail to learn a generative model for instruction sequences, and they cannot achieve good coverage of instruction-parsing code. To overcome such limitations. this paper proposes a collection of techniques for enhancing learning-assisited grammar-based fuzzing. Our approach allows for the learning of a generative model for instruction sequences by training a hybrid character/token-level recursive neural network. In addition, we exploit coverage metrics gathered during previous runs of fuzzing in order to efficiently refine (or fine-tune) the learnt model so that it can make high coverage-inducing new inputs. Our experiments with a real PDF parser show that our approach succeeded in generating new sequences of instructions (in PDF page streams) that induce better code coverage (of the PDF parser) than state-of-the-art learning-assisted grammar-based fuzzers.