Fuzzing Error Handling Code using Context-Sensitive Software Fault Injection

Error handling code is often critical but difficult to test in reality. As a result, many hard-to-find bugs exist in error handling code and may cause serious security problems once triggered. Fuzzing has become a widely used technique for finding software bugs nowadays. Fuzzing approaches mutate and/or generate various inputs to cover infrequently-executed code. However, existing fuzzing approaches are very limited in testing error handling code, because some of this code can be only triggered by occasional errors (such as insufficient memory and network-connection failures), but not specific inputs. Therefore, existing fuzzing approaches in general cannot effectively test such error handling code.

In this paper, we propose a new fuzzing framework named FIFUZZ, to effectively test error handling code and detect bugs. The core of FIFUZZ is a context-sensitive software fault injection (SFI) approach, which can effectively cover error handling code in different calling contexts to find deep bugs hidden in error handling code with complicated contexts. We have implemented FIFUZZ and evaluated it on 9 widely-used C programs. It reports 317 alerts which are caused by 50 unique bugs in terms of the root causes. 32 of these bugs have been confirmed by related developers. We also compare FIFUZZ to existing fuzzing tools (including AFL, AFLFast, AFLSmart and FairFuzz), and find that FIFUZZ finds many bugs missed by these tools. We believe that FIFUZZ can effectively augment existing fuzzing approaches to find many real bugs that have been otherwise missed.