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Nyx-Net: Network Fuzzing with Incremental Snapshots

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posted on 2023-11-29, 18:19 authored by Sergej Schumilo, Cornelius Aschermann, Andrea Jemmett, Ali AbbasiAli Abbasi, Thorsten HolzThorsten Holz
Coverage-guided fuzz testing (“fuzzing”) has become main- stream and we have observed lots of progress in this research area recently. However, it is still challenging to efficiently test network services with existing coverage-guided fuzzing methods. In this paper, we introduce the design and implementation of Nyx-Net, a novel snapshot-based fuzzing approach that can successfully fuzz a wide range of targets spanning servers, clients, games, and even Firefox’s Inter- Process Communication (IPC) interface. Compared to state- of-the-art methods, Nyx-Net improves test throughput by up to 300x and coverage found by up to 70%. Additionally, Nyx-Net is able to find crashes in two of ProFuzzBench’s targets that no other fuzzer found previously. When using Nyx-Net to play the game Super Mario, Nyx-Net shows speedups of 10-30x compared to existing work. Moreover, Nyx-Net is able to find previously unknown bugs in servers such as Lighttpd, clients such as MySQL client, and even Firefox’s IPC mechanism—demonstrating the strength and versatility of the proposed approach. Lastly, our prototype implementation was awarded a $20.000 bug bounty for enabling fuzzing on previously unfuzzable code in Firefox and solving a long-standing problem at Mozilla.

History

Preferred Citation

Sergej Schumilo, Cornelius Aschermann, Andrea Jemmett, Ali Abbasi and Thorsten Holz. Nyx-Net: Network Fuzzing with Incremental Snapshots. In: Eurosys Conference (EuroSys). 2022.

Primary Research Area

  • Threat Detection and Defenses

Name of Conference

Eurosys Conference (EuroSys)

Legacy Posted Date

2022-03-18

Open Access Type

  • Unknown

BibTeX

@inproceedings{cispa_all_3588, title = "Nyx-Net: Network Fuzzing with Incremental Snapshots", author = "Schumilo, Sergej and Aschermann, Cornelius and Jemmett, Andrea and Abbasi, Ali and Holz, Thorsten", booktitle="{Eurosys Conference (EuroSys)}", year="2022", }

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