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

The role of emulation and virtualization in cybersecurity through history

The capability of executing a program with instrumentation – that is, extra code is added to observe particular behaviors – and being able to understand sources and sinks of functions and how an input may influence the state of a system, exploit it, or crash it has become of fundamental importance. Predicting corner cases in programs may save lives, such as in software running in machines in hospitals, airplanes, or dishwashers, among others. Also, security and safety often interleave themselves and mangle in such a way that programs need to be tested for months, if not years, to ensure that plausible issues can be explored. There are many documented cases of rockets and probes self-destructing because of software errors (https://medium.com/swlh/some-of-the-most-famous-bugs-in-software-history-bb16a2ee3f8e).

It is not incidental that one of the most comprehensive documentation on QEMU internals...