A Smart Fuzzing Approach for Integer Overflow Detection

Fuzzing is one of the most commonly used methods to detect software vulnerabilities, a major cause of information security incidents. Although it has advantages of simple design and low error report, its efficiency is usually poor. In this paper we present a smart fuzzing approach for integer overflow detection and a tool, SwordFuzzer, which implements this approach. Unlike standard fuzzing techniques, which randomly change parts of the input file with no information about the underlying syntactic structure of the file, SwordFuzzer uses online dynamic taint analysis to identify which bytes in the input file are used in security sensitive operations and then focuses on mutating such bytes. Thus, the generated inputs are more likely to trigger potential vulnerabilities. We evaluated SwordFuzzer with an example program and a number of real-world applications. The experimental results show that SwordFuzzer can accurately locate the key bytes of the input file and dramatically improve the effectiveness of fuzzing in detecting real-world vulnerabilities. Keywords—information security; vulnerability detection; dynamic taint analysis; smart fuzzing