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

Code structure

We will continue our introduction to QEMU internals by giving a brief overview of the structure of the source tree. In the following paragraphs, we will describe the contents of the most relevant top-level directories. The latest QEMU developments are accessible in the master branch at https://github.com/qemu/qemu, some of which are listed as follows:

  • accel/: A directory containing the implementation of QEMU accelerators – for example, support for Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) (software for hardware-assisted virtualization, which QEMU can use instead of emulation) or using QEMU in the context of the Xen hypervisor (a hypervisor that allows multiple operating system to run concurrently in the same hardware).
  • block/: Routines related to block device I/O (i.e., code for disk access), and disk image creation/manipulation.
  • chardev/: The code for interfacing character devices – for example, output to a TTY device, serial port, and so on.
  • ...