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

Emulation besides QEMU

Emulation is as old as the theorization of computers. One of the properties of Universal Turing Machines (UTMs) is their capability to simulate any other UTM by getting its description. Without getting into complex philosophical and mathematical theory, we can easily say that with one computer and sufficient resources, we may be able to execute the code of any other. Of course, we may not get native performance, but there are astonishing success cases of emulation, which sometimes makes me think about how beautiful the challenge between humans and machines is. For instance, the survival of arcade games is entirely dependent on emulators, simply because nobody no longer knows how their proprietary hardware was built. But passionate people were able to reverse engineer an executable file and understand the architecture of the machine, and yeah – it starts with a bang! Awesome projects such as MAME, Bleem!, and a few others were born. In this chapter, we...