This document walks you through the basic steps to start fuzzing and suggestions for improving your fuzz targets. If you're looking for more advanced fuzzing topics, see the main page.
Generate build files by using the use_libfuzzer GN argument together with a sanitizer:
# AddressSanitizer is the default config we recommend testing with. # Linux: tools/mb/mb.py gen -m chromium.fuzz -b 'Libfuzzer Upload Linux ASan' out/libfuzzer # Chrome OS: tools/mb/mb.py gen -m chromium.fuzz -b 'Libfuzzer Upload Chrome OS ASan' out/libfuzzer # Mac: tools/mb/mb.py gen -m chromium.fuzz -b 'Libfuzzer Upload Mac ASan' out/libfuzzer # Windows: python tools\mb\mb.py gen -m chromium.fuzz -b "Libfuzzer Upload Windows ASan" out\libfuzzer
use_afl GN argument, but we recommend libFuzzer for local development. Running libFuzzer locally doesn't require any special configuration and gives quick, meaningful output for speed, coverage, and other parameters.It’s possible to run fuzz targets without sanitizers, but not recommended, as sanitizers help to detect errors which may not result in a crash otherwise. use_libfuzzer is supported in the following sanitizer configurations.
| GN Argument | Description | Supported OS |
|---|---|---|
is_asan=true | Enables AddressSanitizer to catch problems like buffer overruns. | Linux, Windows, Mac, Chrome OS |
is_msan=true | Enables MemorySanitizer to catch problems like uninitialized reads[*]. | Linux |
is_ubsan_security=true | Enables UndefinedBehaviorSanitizer to catch[*] undefined behavior like integer overflow. | Linux |
For more on builder and sanitizer configurations, see the Integration Reference page.
symbol_level attribute.After you set up your build environment, you can create your first fuzz target:
In the same directory as the code you are going to fuzz (or next to the tests for that code), create a new <my_fuzzer>.cc file.
testing/libfuzzer/fuzzers directory. This directory was used for initial sample fuzz targets but is no longer recommended for landing new targets.In the new file, define a LLVMFuzzerTestOneInput function:
#include <stddef.h> #include <stdint.h> extern "C" int LLVMFuzzerTestOneInput(const uint8_t* data, size_t size) { // Put your fuzzing code here and use |data| and |size| as input. return 0; }
BUILD.gn file, define a fuzzer_test GN target:import("//testing/libfuzzer/fuzzer_test.gni") fuzzer_test("my_fuzzer") { sources = [ "my_fuzzer.cc" ] deps = [ ... ] }
After you create your fuzz target, build it with ninja and run it locally:
# Build the fuzz target. ninja -C out/libfuzzer url_parse_fuzzer # Create an empty corpus directory. mkdir corpus # Run the fuzz target. ./out/libfuzzer/url_parse_fuzzer corpus # If have other corpus directories, pass their paths as well: ./out/libfuzzer/url_parse_fuzzer corpus seed_corpus_dir_1 seed_corpus_dir_N
Your fuzz target should produce output like this:
INFO: Seed: 1511722356 INFO: Loaded 2 modules (115485 guards): 22572 [0x7fe8acddf560, 0x7fe8acdf5610), 92913 [0xaa05d0, 0xafb194), INFO: -max_len is not provided; libFuzzer will not generate inputs larger than 4096 bytes INFO: A corpus is not provided, starting from an empty corpus #2 INITED cov: 961 ft: 48 corp: 1/1b exec/s: 0 rss: 48Mb #3 NEW cov: 986 ft: 70 corp: 2/104b exec/s: 0 rss: 48Mb L: 103/103 MS: 1 InsertRepeatedBytes- #4 NEW cov: 989 ft: 74 corp: 3/106b exec/s: 0 rss: 48Mb L: 2/103 MS: 1 InsertByte- #6 NEW cov: 991 ft: 76 corp: 4/184b exec/s: 0 rss: 48Mb L: 78/103 MS: 2 CopyPart-InsertRepeatedBytes-
A ... NEW ... line appears when libFuzzer finds new and interesting inputs. If your fuzz target is efficient, it will find a lot of them quickly. A ... pulse ... line appears periodically to show the current status.
For more information about the output, see libFuzzer's output documentation.
odr-violation error in the log, please try setting the following environment variable: ASAN_OPTIONS=detect_odr_violation=0 and running the fuzz target again.If your fuzz target crashes when running locally and you see non-symbolized stacktrace, make sure you add the third_party/llvm-build/Release+Asserts/bin/ directory from Chromium’s Clang package in $PATH. This directory contains the llvm-symbolizer binary.
Alternatively, you can set an external_symbolizer_path via the ASAN_OPTIONS environment variable:
ASAN_OPTIONS=external_symbolizer_path=/my/local/llvm/build/llvm-symbolizer \ ./fuzzer ./crash-input
The same approach works with other sanitizers via MSAN_OPTIONS, UBSAN_OPTIONS, etc.
ClusterFuzz and the build infrastructure automatically discover, build and execute all fuzzer_test targets in the Chromium repository. Once you land your fuzz target, ClusterFuzz will run it at scale. Check the ClusterFuzz status page after a day or two.
If you want to better understand and optimize your fuzz target’s performance, see the Efficient Fuzzing Guide.
Your fuzz target may immediately discover interesting (i.e. crashing) inputs. You can make it more effective with several easy steps:
Create a seed corpus. You can guide the fuzzing engine to generate more relevant inputs by adding the seed_corpus = "src/fuzz-testcases/" attribute to your fuzz target and adding example files to the appropriate directory. For more, see the Seed Corpus section of the Efficient Fuzzing Guide.
Create a mutation dictionary. You can make mutations more effective by providing the fuzzer with a dict = "protocol.dict" GN attribute and a dictionary file that contains interesting strings / byte sequences for the target API. For more, see the Fuzzer Dictionary section of the [Efficient Fuzzer Guide].
Specify testcase length limits. Long inputs can be problematic, because they are more slowly processed by the fuzz target and increase the search space. By default, libFuzzer uses -max_len=4096 or takes the longest testcase in the corpus if -max_len is not specified.
ClusterFuzz uses different strategies for different fuzzing sessions, including different random values. Also, ClusterFuzz uses different fuzzing engines (e.g. AFL that doesn't have -max_len option). If your target has an input length limit that you would like to strictly enforce, add a sanity check to the beginning of your LLVMFuzzerTestOneInput function:
if (size < kMinInputLength || size > kMaxInputLength) return 0;
Generate a code coverage report. See which code the fuzzer covered in recent runs, so you can gauge whether it hits the important code parts or not.
Note: Since the code coverage of a fuzz target depends heavily on the corpus provided when running the target, we recommend running the fuzz target built with ASan locally for a little while (several minutes / hours) first. This will produce some corpus, which should be used for generating a code coverage report.
If the code you’re fuzzing generates a lot of error messages when encountering incorrect or invalid data, the fuzz target will be slow and inefficient.
If the target uses Chromium logging APIs, you can silence errors by overriding the environment used for logging in your fuzz target:
struct Environment { Environment() { logging::SetMinLogLevel(logging::LOG_FATAL); } }; extern "C" int LLVMFuzzerTestOneInput(const uint8_t* data, size_t size) { static Environment env; // Put your fuzzing code here and use data+size as input. return 0; }
By default, a fuzzing engine such as libFuzzer mutates a single input (uint8_t* data, size_t size). However, APIs often accept multiple arguments of various types, rather than a single buffer. You can use three different methods to mutate multiple inputs at once.
If you need to mutate multiple inputs of various types and length, see Getting Started with libprotobuf-mutator in Chromium.
If your API accepts a buffer with data and some integer value (i.e., a bitwise combination of flags), we recommend calculating a hash value from (data, size) and using that value to fuzz an additional integer argument. For example:
extern "C" int LLVMFuzzerTestOneInput(const uint8_t* data, size_t size) { std::string str = std::string(reinterpret_cast<const char*>(data), size); std::size_t data_hash = std::hash<std::string>()(str); APIToBeFuzzed(data, size, data_hash); return 0; }
You can extract one or more bytes from the data provided by fuzzing engine and use that value for fuzzing other arguments of the target API or making other decisions (e.g. number of iterations or attempts for calling some function). Note that those bytes should not be used as data for any other arguments, e.g.:
extern "C" int LLVMFuzzerTestOneInput(const uint8_t* data, size_t size) { // Don't forget to enforce minimal data length. if (size < 1) return 0; // Extract single byte for fuzzing "flags" value. uint8_t flags = data[0]; // Wrong, there is a bias between flags and API input. APIToBeFuzzed(data, size, flags); // Good, API input and flags are independent. APIToBeFuzzed(data + 1, size - 1, flags); return 0; }
This approach addresses the problem of the hash-based argument approach, but has its own caveats:
If you extract any bytes from the input (either first or last ones), you cannot use valid samples as seed corpus. In that case, you'll have to generate seed corpus manually, i.e. append necessary bytes to the valid sample inputs.
Imagine that APIToBeFuzzed() had a bug, something like the following:
void APIToBeFuzzed(uint8_t* buffer, size_t length, uint8_t options) { ... if (options == 0x66) { // Yes, looks ridiculous, but things like that did happen in the real world. *(buffer - 1) = -1; } ... }
Assuming we used the fuzz target listed above, neither ASan nor other sanitizers would detect a buffer underwrite vulnerability, as the byte addressed by buffer - 1 is actually a mapped memory allocated inside the fuzzing engine as data[0].
To avoid issues like that one, we would have to allocate a separate buffer and copy API input into it, or use a container object e.g.:
extern "C" int LLVMFuzzerTestOneInput(const uint8_t* data, size_t size) { // Don't forget to enforce minimal data length. if (size < 1) return 0; // Extract single byte for fuzzing flags value. uint8_t flags = data[0]; // Put API input into a separate container. std::vector<uint8_t> buffer(data + 1, data + size); APIToBeFuzzed(buffer.data(), buffer.size(), flags); return 0; }
There is FuzzedDataProvider class that might be helpful for writing fuzz targets using that approach. In order to use it, add #include <fuzzer/FuzzedDataProvider.h> to your fuzz target source file. To learn more about FuzzedDataProvider, check out the google/fuzzing documentation page on it.
Note that it's not recommended to use FuzzedDataProvider unless you actually need to split the fuzz input. If you need to convert the fuzz input into a vector or string object, for example, simply initialize that object by passing const uint8_t* data, size_t size to its constructor.