Novelty Not Found: Adaptive Fuzzer Restarts to Improve Input Space Coverage (Registered Report).

Feedback-driven greybox fuzzing is one of the cornerstones of modern bug detection techniques. Its flexibility, automated nature, and effectiveness render it an indispensable tool for making software more secure. A key feature that enables its impressive performance is coverage feedback, which guides the fuzzer to explore different parts of the program. The most prominent way to use this feedback is novelty search , in which the fuzzer generates new inputs and only keeps those that have exercised a new program edge. This is grounded in the assumption that novel coverage is a proxy for interestingness. Bolstered by its widespread success, it is easy to overlook its limitations. Particularly the phenomenon of input shadowing , situations in which an “interesting” input is discarded because it does not contribute novel coverage, needs to be considered. This phenomenon limits the explorable input space and risks missing bugs when shadowed inputs are more amenable to mutations that would trigger bugs. In this work, we analyze input shadowing in more detail and find that multiple fuzzing runs of the same target exhibit a different basic block hit frequency despite overlapping code coverage. In other words, different fuzzing runs may find the same set of basic blocks but one might exercise specific basic blocks significantly more often than the other, and vice versa. To better distribute the frequency, we propose restarting the fuzzer to reset the fuzzing state, diversifying the fuzzer’s attention across basic blocks. Our preliminary evaluation of three Fuzzbench targets finds that fuzzer restarts effectively distribute the basic block hit frequencies and boost the achieved coverage by up to 9.3%.