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  4. Tango: Extracting Higher-Order Feedback through State Inference
 
conference paper

Tango: Extracting Higher-Order Feedback through State Inference

Hazimeh, Ahmad
•
Xu, Duo
•
Liu, Qiang
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September 30, 2024
ACM International Conference Proceeding Series
27 International Symposium on Research in Attacks, Intrusions and Defenses

Fuzzing is the de facto standard for automated testing. However, while coverage-guided fuzzing excels at code discovery, its effectiveness falters when applied to complex systems. One such class entails persistent targets whose behavior depends on the state of the system, where code coverage alone is insufficient for comprehensive testing. It is difficult for a fuzzer to optimize for state discovery when the feedback does not correlate with the objective. We introduce Tango, an extensible framework for state-aware fuzzing. Our design incorporates “state” as a first-class citizen in all operations, enabling Tango to fuzz complex targets that otherwise remain out-of-scope. We present state inference, a cross-validation technique that distills portable coverage metrics to reveal hidden path dependencies in the target. This in turn allows us to aggregate feedback from different paths while maintaining state-specific operation. We leverage Tango to fuzz stateful targets covering network servers, language parsers, and video games, demonstrating the flexibility of our framework in exploring complex systems. Using state inference, we shrink the scheduling queue of a fuzzer by around seven times by identifying functionally equivalent paths. We extend current state-of-the-art fuzzers, i.e., AFL++ and Nyx-Net, with state feedback from Tango. During our evaluation, fuzzers using our technique uncovered two new bugs in yajl and dcmtk.

  • Details
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Type
conference paper
DOI
10.1145/3678890.3678908
Scopus ID

2-s2.0-85206566183

Author(s)
Hazimeh, Ahmad

EPFL

Xu, Duo

EPFL

Liu, Qiang

EPFL

Wang, Yan

Huawei

Payer, Mathias  

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

Date Issued

2024-09-30

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

Published in
ACM International Conference Proceeding Series
ISBN of the book

9798400709593

Start page

403

End page

418

Subjects

Network Protocol Fuzzing

•

State Inference

•

State-aware Fuzzing

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
HEXHIVE  
Event nameEvent acronymEvent placeEvent date
27 International Symposium on Research in Attacks, Intrusions and Defenses

Padua, Italy

2024-09-30 - 2024-10-02

FunderFunding(s)Grant NumberGrant URL

European Research Council

European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program

850868

SNSF

PCEGP2_186974

Available on Infoscience
April 4, 2025
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/248598
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