1 To report security bugs, see ‘SECURITY’ in the top source directory.
3 Fuzzing nbdkit using the American Fuzzy Lop (afl) fuzzer
4 ========================================================
6 We can fuzz nbdkit using the -s (read from stdin) option, and feeding
7 in a file of "network" input. The stdout from nbdkit (ie. data that
8 would normally be sent back to the client) is ignored.
10 You will need to recompile nbdkit with afl instrumentation:
12 ./configure CC=/usr/bin/afl-gcc CXX=/usr/bin/afl-g++
16 The fuzzing/testcase_dir directory contains some initial testcases
19 Run multiple copies of afl-fuzz. Usually you should run 1 master (-M)
20 and as many slaves (-S) as you can.
24 mkdir -p fuzzing/sync_dir
25 afl-fuzz -i fuzzing/testcase_dir -o fuzzing/sync_dir -m 256 -M fuzz01 \
26 ./server/nbdkit -s ./plugins/memory/.libs/nbdkit-memory-plugin.so 1M
30 # replace fuzzNN with fuzz02, fuzz03, etc.
31 afl-fuzz -i fuzzing/testcase_dir -o fuzzing/sync_dir -m 256 -S fuzzNN \
32 ./server/nbdkit -s ./plugins/memory/.libs/nbdkit-memory-plugin.so 1M
37 To find out if the fuzzing is covering all of the code, I used afl-cov
38 (https://github.com/mrash/afl-cov). Usage is rather complex, so
39 consult the README of that project, but in brief:
41 (1) Create a second copy of the nbdkit source, and compile it with
44 ./configure CFLAGS="-O2 -g -pg -fprofile-arcs -ftest-coverage"
48 (2) Assuming ../nbdkit-afl is the nbdkit source compiled with afl, and
49 the current directory is nbdkit compiled with profiling, then run the
50 command below. You can run this even while afl-fuzz is running.
52 afl-cov -d ../nbdkit-afl/fuzzing/sync_dir \
54 --coverage-cmd "cat AFL_FILE | ./server/nbdkit -s ./plugins/memory/.libs/nbdkit-memory-plugin.so 1M"
56 This will create an HTML test coverage report in
57 ../nbdkit-afl/fuzzing/sync_dir/cov/web/
62 We only have testcases for the newstyle fixed protocol so far, but if
63 people report that they are exposing the oldstyle protocol to the
64 internet / untrusted clients then we could extend the testing for
67 We have only fuzzed the memory plugin, which is convenient because it
68 stores everything in memory and throws it away when nbdkit exits.
69 Since plugins can have bugs as well as the core server, it may be
70 productive to test other plugins and filters.
72 Fuzzing nbdkit using Clang + libFuzzer
73 ======================================
75 Recompile nbdkit with libFuzzer enabled and build the libFuzzer test
80 CFLAGS="-g -O1 -fPIC" \
84 make CFLAGS="-g -O1 -fPIC -fsanitize=fuzzer,address"
86 (The awkward CFLAGS on the make command line are necessary because
87 ./configure attempts to test that the compiler works, but this test
88 fails when -fsanitize=fuzzer is used as that option adds an extra
91 ",address" enables the Clang Address Sanitizer, and can be omitted for
94 This builds a specialized version of nbdkit which is the fuzzer test
95 program (testing only nbdkit-memory-plugin unless you modify the
96 source). You can run it like this on the input corpus:
98 ./server/nbdkit fuzzing/testcase_dir
100 New test inputs are written to fuzzing/testcase_dir and will be used
101 on subsequent runs. If this is undesirable then delete
102 fuzzing/testcase_dir/[0-f]* before the run.
104 There are various extra command line options supported by libFuzzer.
105 For more details see:
107 https://llvm.org/docs/LibFuzzer.html