Towards Smart Hybrid Fuzzing for Smart Contracts

Smart contracts are Turing-complete programs that are executed across a blockchain network. Unlike traditional programs, once deployed they cannot be modified. As smart contracts become more popular and carry more value, they become more of an interesting target for attackers. In recent years, smart contracts suffered major exploits, costing millions of dollars, due to programming errors. As a result, a variety of tools for detecting bugs has been proposed. However, majority of these tools often yield many false positives due to over-approximation or poor code coverage due to complex path constraints. Fuzzing or fuzz testing is a popular and effective software testing technique. However, traditional fuzzers tend to be more effective towards finding shallow bugs and less effective in finding bugs that lie deeper in the execution. In this work, we present CONFUZZIUS, a hybrid fuzzer that combines evolutionary fuzzing with constraint solving in order to execute more code and find more bugs in smart contracts. Evolutionary fuzzing is used to exercise shallow parts of a smart contract, while constraint solving is used to generate inputs which satisfy complex conditions that prevent the evolutionary fuzzing from exploring deeper paths. Moreover, we use data dependency analysis to efficiently generate sequences of transactions, that create specific contract states in which bugs may be hidden. We evaluate the effectiveness of our fuzzing strategy, by comparing CONFUZZIUS with state-of-the-art symbolic execution tools and fuzzers. Our evaluation shows that our hybrid fuzzing approach produces significantly better results than state-of-the-art symbolic execution tools and fuzzers

Combining Static and Dynamic Analysis for Vulnerability Detection

In this paper, we present a hybrid approach for buffer overflow detection in C code. The approach makes use of static and dynamic analysis of the application under investigation. The static part consists in calculating taint dependency sequences (TDS) between user controlled inputs and vulnerable statements. This process is akin to program slice of interest to calculate tainted data- and control-flow path which exhibits the dependence between tainted program inputs and vulnerable statements in the code. The dynamic part consists of executing the program along TDSs to trigger the vulnerability by generating suitable inputs. We use genetic algorithm to generate inputs. We propose a fitness function that approximates the program behavior (control flow) based on the frequencies of the statements along TDSs. This runtime aspect makes the approach faster and accurate. We provide experimental results on the Verisec benchmark to validate our approach.Comment: There are 15 pages with 1 figur

Directed Greybox Fuzzing with Stepwise Constraint Focusing

Dynamic data flow analysis has been widely used to guide greybox fuzzing. However, traditional dynamic data flow analysis tends to go astray in the massive path tracking and requires to process a large volume of data, resulting in low efficiency in reaching the target location. In this paper, we propose a directed greybox fuzzer based on dynamic constraint filtering and focusing (CONFF). First, all path constraints are tracked, and those with high priority are filtered as the next solution targets. Next, focusing on a single path constraint to be satisfied, we obtain its data condition and probe the mapping relationship between it and the input bytes through multi-byte mapping and single-byte mapping. Finally, various mutation strategies are utilized to solve the path constraint currently focused on, and the target location of the program is gradually approached through path selection. The CONFF fuzzer can reach a specific location faster in the target program, thus efficiently triggering the crash. We designed and implemented a prototype of the CONFF fuzzer and evaluated it with the LAVA-1 dataset and some real-world vulnerabilities. The results show that the CONFF fuzzer can reproduce crashes on the LAVA-1 dataset and most of the real-world vulnerabilities. For most vulnerabilities, the CONFF fuzzer reproduced the crashes with significantly reduced time compared to state-of-the-art fuzzers. On average, the CONFF fuzzer was 23.7x faster than the state-of-the-art code coverage-based fuzzer Angora and 27.3x faster than the classical directed greybox fuzzer AFLGo