Book Image

Fuzzing Against the Machine

By : Antonio Nappa, Eduardo Blázquez
Book Image

Fuzzing Against the Machine

By: Antonio Nappa, Eduardo Blázquez

Overview of this book

Emulation and fuzzing are among the many techniques that can be used to improve cybersecurity; however, utilizing these efficiently can be tricky. Fuzzing Against the Machine is your hands-on guide to understanding how these powerful tools and techniques work. Using a variety of real-world use cases and practical examples, this book helps you grasp the fundamental concepts of fuzzing and emulation along with advanced vulnerability research, providing you with the tools and skills needed to find security flaws in your software. The book begins by introducing you to two open source fuzzer engines: QEMU, which allows you to run software for whatever architecture you can think of, and American fuzzy lop (AFL) and its improved version AFL++. You’ll learn to combine these powerful tools to create your own emulation and fuzzing environment and then use it to discover vulnerabilities in various systems, such as iOS, Android, and Samsung's Mobile Baseband software, Shannon. After reading the introductions and setting up your environment, you’ll be able to dive into whichever chapter you want, although the topics gradually become more advanced as the book progresses. By the end of this book, you’ll have gained the skills, knowledge, and practice required to find flaws in any firmware by emulating and fuzzing it with QEMU and several fuzzing engines.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Part 1: Foundations
5
Part 2: Emulation and Fuzzing
9
Part 3: Advanced Concepts
15
Chapter 12: Conclusion and Final Remarks

Obtaining a crash

To trigger a crash, we need to make some modifications to our setup. First, we will update the input generation process. Instead of using the gen.py script, we will use gen2.py, which will create a new folder called gen2-inputs:

./gen2.py
ls -lah gen2-inputs/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 328K Dec  8 15:06 .
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 4.0K Dec  8 19:59 ..
-rw-r--r-- 3 root root   52 Dec  8 15:06 call000-0
-rw-r--r-- 3 root root   48 Dec  8 15:06 call000-1
-rw-r--r-- 3 root root   34 Dec  8 15:06 call000-10
-rw-r--r-- 3 root root   41 Dec  8 15:06 call000-11
-rw-r--r-- 3 root root   42 Dec  8 15:06 call000-12
-rw-r--r-- 3 root root   49 Dec  8 15:06 call000-13
-rw-r--r-- 3 root root   30 Dec  8 15:06 call000-14
…

Next, we need to make two modifications to the runFuzz script...