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

Deus Ex Machina: Fuzzing Android Libraries

How can we choose what to fuzz and why, identify a suitable platform and library, and finally, craft a harness? This is like selecting the safe that you want to open, based on its mechanisms, interfaces, and capabilities. All the pros and cons are up against a single factor: time. We all are constantly struggling against time, the most precious resource, the one that gives meaning and importance to our actions. What would the impact be of a zero-day vulnerability if the systems were already patched? None of course, at least for the systems where that vulnerability had been patched.

This is somehow paradoxical; indeed there’s an eternal arms race between system makers and system breakers. Both have the same timeline but the value of their findings may distort the timeline and create somehow parallel and plausible scenarios until the patch would be released and many of these scenarios would collapse in the next software version. If...