Fuzzing for fun and profit

Published 2025-10-07 on Farid Zakaria's Blog

I watched recently a keynote by Will Wilson on fuzzing – Fuzzing’25 Keynote. The talk is excellent, and one main highlight is the fact we have at our disposal is the capability to “fuzz” our software toaday and yet we do not.

While I’ve seen the power of QuickCheck-like tools to create property based testing, I never had never used fuzzing over an application as a whole, specifically American Fuzzy Lop. I was intrigued to add this skill to my toolbelt and maybe apply it to CppNix.

As with everything else, I need to learn things from first principles. I would like to create a scenario with a known-failure and see how AFL discovers it.

To get started let’s first make sure we have access to AFL via Nix.

We will be using AFL++, the daughter of AFL that incorporates never updates and features.

> nix-shell -p aflplusplus

How does AFL work? 🤔

AFL will feed your program various inputs to try and cause a crash! 💥

In order to generate better inputs, you compile your code with a variant of gcc or clang distributed by AFL which will insert special instructions to keep track of coverage of branches as it creates various test cases.

Let’s create a demo program that crashes when given the input Farid.

We leverage a volatile int so that the compiler does not optimize the multiple if instructions together.

#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <signal.h>

#define INPUT_SIZE 10

void crash() {
  raise(SIGSEGV);
}

int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
  char buffer[INPUT_SIZE] = {0};

  if (fgets(buffer, INPUT_SIZE, stdin) == NULL) {
    fprintf(stderr, "Error reading input.\n");
    return 1;
  }

  // So the if statements are not optimized together
  volatile int progress_tracker = 0;

  if (strlen(buffer) < 5) {
    return 0;
  }

  if (buffer[0] == 'F') {
    progress_tracker ++;
    if (buffer[1] == 'a') {
      progress_tracker ++;
      if (buffer[2] == 'r') {
        progress_tracker ++;
        if (buffer[3] == 'i') {
          progress_tracker ++;
          if (buffer[4] == 'd') {
            crash();
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }
  return 0;
}

We now can compile our code with afl-cc to get the instrumented binary.

> afl-cc demo.c -o demo

AFL needs to be given some sample inputs Let’s feed it the simplest starter seed possible – an empty file!

> mkdir -p seed_dir
> echo "" > seed_dir/empty_input.txt

Now we simply run afl-fuzz, and the magic happens. ✨

> afl-fuzz -i seed_dir -o out_dir -- ./demo

A really nice TUI appears that informs you of various statistics of the running fuzzer, and importantly if any crashes had been found – saved crashes : 1 !

          american fuzzy lop ++4.32c {default} (./demo) [explore]          
┌─ process timing ────────────────────────────────────┬─ overall results ────┐
│        run time : 0 days, 0 hrs, 33 min, 4 sec      │  cycles done : 3191  │
│   last new find : 0 days, 0 hrs, 33 min, 2 sec      │ corpus count : 6     │
│last saved crash : 0 days, 0 hrs, 33 min, 1 sec      │saved crashes : 1     │
│ last saved hang : none seen yet                     │  saved hangs : 0     │
├─ cycle progress ─────────────────────┬─ map coverage┴──────────────────────┤
│  now processing : 4.7238 (66.7%)     │    map density : 16.67% / 44.44%    │
│  runs timed out : 0 (0.00%)          │ count coverage : 45.00 bits/tuple   │
├─ stage progress ─────────────────────┼─ findings in depth ─────────────────┤
│  now trying : havoc                  │ favored items : 5 (83.33%)          │
│ stage execs : 496/800 (62.00%)       │  new edges on : 6 (100.00%)         │
│ total execs : 13.5M                  │ total crashes : 1014 (1 saved)      │
│  exec speed : 6566/sec               │  total tmouts : 0 (0 saved)         │
├─ fuzzing strategy yields ────────────┴─────────────┬─ item geometry ───────┤
│   bit flips : 0/0, 0/0, 0/0                        │    levels : 5         │
│  byte flips : 0/0, 0/0, 0/0                        │   pending : 0         │
│ arithmetics : 0/0, 0/0, 0/0                        │  pend fav : 0         │
│  known ints : 0/0, 0/0, 0/0                        │ own finds : 5         │
│  dictionary : 0/0, 0/0, 0/0, 0/0                   │  imported : 0         │
│havoc/splice : 6/13.5M, 0/0                         │ stability : 100.00%   │
│py/custom/rq : unused, unused, unused, unused       ├───────────────────────┘
│    trim/eff : 64.13%/20, n/a                       │          [cpu000: 18%]
└─ strategy: exploit ────────── state: running...  ──┘

The output directory contains all the saved information including the input that caused the crashes.

Let’s inspect it!

> cat "out_dir/default/crashes/id:000000,sig:11,src:000005,time:2119,execs:14486,op:havoc,rep:1" 
Farid

Huzzah! 🥳

AFL was successfully able to find our code-word, Farid, that caused the crash.

It is important to note however that for my simple program it found the failure-case rather quickly, however for large programs it can take a long time to explore the complete state space. Companies such as Google, continously run fuzzers such as AFL on well-known open source projects to help detect failures.

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