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

A Famous Refrain: AFL + QEMU = CVEs

In this chapter, we will focus on finding our first vulnerability, which is a VLC remote code execution from 2011, also known as CVE-2011-0531. We will start by discussing a user space program vulnerability and how we can discover it using a fuzzer. Then, we will take another step and apply the fuzzer to an entire system to perform full-system fuzzing and vulnerability discovery.

We will begin by explaining the process of finding a single program vulnerability using a fuzzer, which is easier to grasp conceptually. Then, we will use the example of VLC to illustrate the principles of fuzzing and vulnerability research. Later on, we will apply the same approach to a full-system fuzzing harness.

Overall, we aim to provide a clear and comprehensive guide to the process of fuzzing and vulnerability discovery. By starting with a single program and gradually moving to full-system fuzzing, we hope to equip readers with a solid understanding of the fundamentals...