5 This document describes the virtual-device fuzzing infrastructure in QEMU and
6 how to use it to implement additional fuzzers.
11 Fuzzing operates by passing inputs to an entry point/target function. The
12 fuzzer tracks the code coverage triggered by the input. Based on these
13 findings, the fuzzer mutates the input and repeats the fuzzing.
15 To fuzz QEMU, we rely on libfuzzer. Unlike other fuzzers such as AFL, libfuzzer
16 is an *in-process* fuzzer. For the developer, this means that it is their
17 responsibility to ensure that state is reset between fuzzing-runs.
22 *NOTE*: If possible, build a 32-bit binary. When forking, the 32-bit fuzzer is
23 much faster, since the page-map has a smaller size. This is due to the fact that
24 AddressSanitizer maps ~20TB of memory, as part of its detection. This results
25 in a large page-map, and a much slower ``fork()``.
27 To build the fuzzers, install a recent version of clang:
28 Configure with (substitute the clang binaries with the version you installed).
29 Here, enable-sanitizers, is optional but it allows us to reliably detect bugs
30 such as out-of-bounds accesses, use-after-frees, double-frees etc.::
32 CC=clang-8 CXX=clang++-8 /path/to/configure --enable-fuzzing \
35 Fuzz targets are built similarly to system targets::
39 This builds ``./qemu-fuzz-i386``
41 The first option to this command is: ``--fuzz-target=FUZZ_NAME``
42 To list all of the available fuzzers run ``qemu-fuzz-i386`` with no arguments.
46 ./qemu-fuzz-i386 --fuzz-target=virtio-scsi-fuzz
48 Internally, libfuzzer parses all arguments that do not begin with ``"--"``.
49 Information about these is available by passing ``-help=1``
51 Now the only thing left to do is wait for the fuzzer to trigger potential
54 Useful libFuzzer flags
55 ----------------------
57 As mentioned above, libFuzzer accepts some arguments. Passing ``-help=1`` will
58 list the available arguments. In particular, these arguments might be helpful:
60 * ``CORPUS_DIR/`` : Specify a directory as the last argument to libFuzzer.
61 libFuzzer stores each "interesting" input in this corpus directory. The next
62 time you run libFuzzer, it will read all of the inputs from the corpus, and
63 continue fuzzing from there. You can also specify multiple directories.
64 libFuzzer loads existing inputs from all specified directories, but will only
65 write new ones to the first one specified.
67 * ``-max_len=4096`` : specify the maximum byte-length of the inputs libFuzzer
70 * ``-close_fd_mask={1,2,3}`` : close, stderr, or both. Useful for targets that
71 trigger many debug/error messages, or create output on the serial console.
73 * ``-jobs=4 -workers=4`` : These arguments configure libFuzzer to run 4 fuzzers in
74 parallel (4 fuzzing jobs in 4 worker processes). Alternatively, with only
75 ``-jobs=N``, libFuzzer automatically spawns a number of workers less than or equal
76 to half the available CPU cores. Replace 4 with a number appropriate for your
77 machine. Make sure to specify a ``CORPUS_DIR``, which will allow the parallel
78 fuzzers to share information about the interesting inputs they find.
80 * ``-use_value_profile=1`` : For each comparison operation, libFuzzer computes
81 ``(caller_pc&4095) | (popcnt(Arg1 ^ Arg2) << 12)`` and places this in the
82 coverage table. Useful for targets with "magic" constants. If Arg1 came from
83 the fuzzer's input and Arg2 is a magic constant, then each time the Hamming
84 distance between Arg1 and Arg2 decreases, libFuzzer adds the input to the
87 * ``-shrink=1`` : Tries to make elements of the corpus "smaller". Might lead to
88 better coverage performance, depending on the target.
90 Note that libFuzzer's exact behavior will depend on the version of
91 clang and libFuzzer used to build the device fuzzers.
93 Generating Coverage Reports
94 ---------------------------
96 Code coverage is a crucial metric for evaluating a fuzzer's performance.
97 libFuzzer's output provides a "cov: " column that provides a total number of
98 unique blocks/edges covered. To examine coverage on a line-by-line basis we
99 can use Clang coverage:
101 1. Configure libFuzzer to store a corpus of all interesting inputs (see
103 2. ``./configure`` the QEMU build with ::
106 --extra-cflags="-fprofile-instr-generate -fcoverage-mapping"
108 3. Re-run the fuzzer. Specify $CORPUS_DIR/* as an argument, telling libfuzzer
109 to execute all of the inputs in $CORPUS_DIR and exit. Once the process
110 exits, you should find a file, "default.profraw" in the working directory.
111 4. Execute these commands to generate a detailed HTML coverage-report::
113 llvm-profdata merge -output=default.profdata default.profraw
114 llvm-cov show ./path/to/qemu-fuzz-i386 -instr-profile=default.profdata \
115 --format html -output-dir=/path/to/output/report
120 Coverage over virtual devices can be improved by adding additional fuzzers.
121 Fuzzers are kept in ``tests/qtest/fuzz/`` and should be added to
122 ``tests/qtest/fuzz/meson.build``
124 Fuzzers can rely on both qtest and libqos to communicate with virtual devices.
126 1. Create a new source file. For example ``tests/qtest/fuzz/foo-device-fuzz.c``.
128 2. Write the fuzzing code using the libqtest/libqos API. See existing fuzzers
131 3. Add the fuzzer to ``tests/qtest/fuzz/meson.build``.
133 Fuzzers can be more-or-less thought of as special qtest programs which can
134 modify the qtest commands and/or qtest command arguments based on inputs
135 provided by libfuzzer. Libfuzzer passes a byte array and length. Commonly the
136 fuzzer loops over the byte-array interpreting it as a list of qtest commands,
137 addresses, or values.
142 Writing a fuzz target can be a lot of effort (especially if a device driver has
143 not be built-out within libqos). Many devices can be fuzzed to some degree,
144 without any device-specific code, using the generic-fuzz target.
146 The generic-fuzz target is capable of fuzzing devices over their PIO, MMIO,
147 and DMA input-spaces. To apply the generic-fuzz to a device, we need to define
148 two env-variables, at minimum:
150 * ``QEMU_FUZZ_ARGS=`` is the set of QEMU arguments used to configure a machine, with
151 the device attached. For example, if we want to fuzz the virtio-net device
152 attached to a pc-i440fx machine, we can specify::
154 QEMU_FUZZ_ARGS="-M pc -nodefaults -netdev user,id=user0 \
155 -device virtio-net,netdev=user0"
157 * ``QEMU_FUZZ_OBJECTS=`` is a set of space-delimited strings used to identify
158 the MemoryRegions that will be fuzzed. These strings are compared against
159 MemoryRegion names and MemoryRegion owner names, to decide whether each
160 MemoryRegion should be fuzzed. These strings support globbing. For the
161 virtio-net example, we could use one of ::
163 QEMU_FUZZ_OBJECTS='virtio-net'
164 QEMU_FUZZ_OBJECTS='virtio*'
165 QEMU_FUZZ_OBJECTS='virtio* pcspk' # Fuzz the virtio devices and the speaker
166 QEMU_FUZZ_OBJECTS='*' # Fuzz the whole machine``
168 The ``"info mtree"`` and ``"info qom-tree"`` monitor commands can be especially
169 useful for identifying the ``MemoryRegion`` and ``Object`` names used for
172 As a generic rule-of-thumb, the more ``MemoryRegions``/Devices we match, the
173 greater the input-space, and the smaller the probability of finding crashing
174 inputs for individual devices. As such, it is usually a good idea to limit the
175 fuzzer to only a few ``MemoryRegions``.
177 To ensure that these env variables have been configured correctly, we can use::
179 ./qemu-fuzz-i386 --fuzz-target=generic-fuzz -runs=0
181 The output should contain a complete list of matched MemoryRegions.
185 QEMU is continuously fuzzed on `OSS-Fuzz
186 <https://github.com/google/oss-fuzz>`_. By default, the OSS-Fuzz build
187 will try to fuzz every fuzz-target. Since the generic-fuzz target
188 requires additional information provided in environment variables, we
189 pre-define some generic-fuzz configs in
190 ``tests/qtest/fuzz/generic_fuzz_configs.h``. Each config must specify:
192 - ``.name``: To identify the fuzzer config
194 - ``.args`` OR ``.argfunc``: A string or pointer to a function returning a
195 string. These strings are used to specify the ``QEMU_FUZZ_ARGS``
196 environment variable. ``argfunc`` is useful when the config relies on e.g.
197 a dynamically created temp directory, or a free tcp/udp port.
199 - ``.objects``: A string that specifies the ``QEMU_FUZZ_OBJECTS`` environment
202 To fuzz additional devices/device configuration on OSS-Fuzz, send patches for
203 either a new device-specific fuzzer or a new generic-fuzz config.
207 - The Dockerfile that sets up the environment for building QEMU's
208 fuzzers on OSS-Fuzz can be fund in the OSS-Fuzz repository
209 __(https://github.com/google/oss-fuzz/blob/master/projects/qemu/Dockerfile)
211 - The script responsible for building the fuzzers can be found in the
212 QEMU source tree at ``scripts/oss-fuzz/build.sh``
214 Building Crash Reproducers
215 -----------------------------------------
216 When we find a crash, we should try to create an independent reproducer, that
217 can be used on a non-fuzzer build of QEMU. This filters out any potential
218 false-positives, and improves the debugging experience for developers.
219 Here are the steps for building a reproducer for a crash found by the
222 - Ensure the crash reproduces::
224 qemu-fuzz-i386 --fuzz-target... ./crash-...
226 - Gather the QTest output for the crash::
228 QEMU_FUZZ_TIMEOUT=0 QTEST_LOG=1 FUZZ_SERIALIZE_QTEST=1 \
229 qemu-fuzz-i386 --fuzz-target... ./crash-... &> /tmp/trace
231 - Reorder and clean-up the resulting trace::
233 scripts/oss-fuzz/reorder_fuzzer_qtest_trace.py /tmp/trace > /tmp/reproducer
235 - Get the arguments needed to start qemu, and provide a path to qemu::
237 less /tmp/trace # The args should be logged at the top of this file
238 export QEMU_ARGS="-machine ..."
239 export QEMU_PATH="path/to/qemu-system"
241 - Ensure the crash reproduces in qemu-system::
243 $QEMU_PATH $QEMU_ARGS -qtest stdio < /tmp/reproducer
245 - From the crash output, obtain some string that identifies the crash. This
246 can be a line in the stack-trace, for example::
248 export CRASH_TOKEN="hw/usb/hcd-xhci.c:1865"
250 - Minimize the reproducer::
252 scripts/oss-fuzz/minimize_qtest_trace.py -M1 -M2 \
253 /tmp/reproducer /tmp/reproducer-minimized
255 - Confirm that the minimized reproducer still crashes::
257 $QEMU_PATH $QEMU_ARGS -qtest stdio < /tmp/reproducer-minimized
259 - Create a one-liner reproducer that can be sent over email::
261 ./scripts/oss-fuzz/output_reproducer.py -bash /tmp/reproducer-minimized
263 - Output the C source code for a test case that will reproduce the bug::
265 ./scripts/oss-fuzz/output_reproducer.py -owner "John Smith <john@smith.com>"\
266 -name "test_function_name" /tmp/reproducer-minimized
268 - Report the bug and send a patch with the C reproducer upstream
270 Implementation Details / Fuzzer Lifecycle
271 -----------------------------------------
273 The fuzzer has two entrypoints that libfuzzer calls. libfuzzer provides it's
274 own ``main()``, which performs some setup, and calls the entrypoints:
276 ``LLVMFuzzerInitialize``: called prior to fuzzing. Used to initialize all of the
279 ``LLVMFuzzerTestOneInput``: called for each fuzzing run. Processes the input and
280 resets the state at the end of each run.
284 ``LLVMFuzzerInitialize`` parses the arguments to the fuzzer (must start with two
285 dashes, so they are ignored by libfuzzer ``main()``). Currently, the arguments
286 select the fuzz target. Then, the qtest client is initialized. If the target
287 requires qos, qgraph is set up and the QOM/LIBQOS modules are initialized.
288 Then the QGraph is walked and the QEMU cmd_line is determined and saved.
290 After this, the ``vl.c:qemu_main`` is called to set up the guest. There are
291 target-specific hooks that can be called before and after qemu_main, for
292 additional setup(e.g. PCI setup, or VM snapshotting).
294 ``LLVMFuzzerTestOneInput``: Uses qtest/qos functions to act based on the fuzz
295 input. It is also responsible for manually calling ``main_loop_wait`` to ensure
296 that bottom halves are executed and any cleanup required before the next input.
298 Since the same process is reused for many fuzzing runs, QEMU state needs to
299 be reset at the end of each run. There are currently two implemented
300 options for resetting state:
302 - Reboot the guest between runs.
303 - *Pros*: Straightforward and fast for simple fuzz targets.
305 - *Cons*: Depending on the device, does not reset all device state. If the
306 device requires some initialization prior to being ready for fuzzing (common
307 for QOS-based targets), this initialization needs to be done after each
310 - *Example target*: ``i440fx-qtest-reboot-fuzz``
312 - Run each test case in a separate forked process and copy the coverage
313 information back to the parent. This is fairly similar to AFL's "deferred"
316 - *Pros*: Relatively fast. Devices only need to be initialized once. No need to
317 do slow reboots or vmloads.
319 - *Cons*: Not officially supported by libfuzzer. Does not work well for
320 devices that rely on dedicated threads.
322 - *Example target*: ``virtio-net-fork-fuzz``