RULF: Rust Library Fuzzing via API Dependency Graph Traversal

Authors: Jianfeng Jiang, Hui Xu, Yangfan Zhou

This paper has been accepted in Proc. of The 36th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE), November, 2021
License: CC BY 4.0

Results of the summarizing process for the arXiv paper: 2104.12064v3

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Abstract: Robustness is a key concern for Rust library development because Rust promises no risks of undefined behaviors if developers use safe APIs only. Fuzzing is a practical approach for examining the robustness of programs. However, existing fuzzing tools are not directly applicable to library APIs due to the absence of fuzz targets. It mainly relies on human efforts to design fuzz targets case by case which is labor-intensive. To address this problem, this paper proposes a novel automated fuzz target generation approach for fuzzing Rust libraries via API dependency graph traversal. We identify several essential requirements for library fuzzing, including validity and effectiveness of fuzz targets, high API coverage, and efficiency. To meet these requirements, we first employ breadth-first search with pruning to find API sequences under a length threshold, then we backward search longer sequences for uncovered APIs, and finally we optimize the sequence set as a set covering problem. We implement our fuzz target generator and conduct fuzzing experiments with AFL++ on several real-world popular Rust projects. Our tool finally generates 7 to 118 fuzz targets for each library with API coverage up to 0.92. We exercise each target with a threshold of 24 hours and find 30 previously-unknown bugs from seven libraries.

Submitted to arXiv on 25 Apr. 2021

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