[This piece is co-authored with Vsevolod Livinskii.] Formal verification isn’t some sort of magic pixie dust that we sprinkle over a computer system to make it better. Real formal verification involves a lot of the same kind of difficult, nasty, grungy engineering work that any other systems-level job involves…
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This is great work. Though I must confess I’m more interested (and far more uneasy) about the other side of the coin — people developing projects like these involving machine learning to find and exploit the vulnerabilities in a fully automated fashion. This is related to, but not quite the same as, attempts at…
“An obvious way to deal with embedded interpreters — which someone must have thought of and tried, but I don’t have any pointers — would be to have an API for teaching the fuzzer how to see coverage of the language being interpreted.”
The issue with things like Frama-C is that they are by far the easiest to use if you start out a project using them, and you often don’t know which projects you retroactively wished you had done so until they are big and crufty.
Byte swapping does not necessarily imply the data comes from an external source. For example, when writing graphics code, you sometimes need to do byte swapping if you’re converting between 24-bit RGB and BGR image formats (Windows’ GDI famously uses BGR so this is one place where you need to do such conversions)…
Mutation-based fuzzing is based on the idea that new, bug-triggering inputs can often be created by randomly modifying existing, non-bug-triggering inputs. For example, if we wanted to find bugs in a PDF reader, we could grab a bunch of PDF files off the web, mutate them by flipping a few bits or something, and feed…