Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

5-2020

Abstract

Uncontrolled memory consumption is a kind of critical software security weaknesses. It can also become a security-critical vulnerability when attackers can take control of the input to consume a large amount of memory and launch a Denial-of-Service attack. However, detecting such vulnerability is challenging, as the state-of-the-art fuzzing techniques focus on the code coverage but not memory consumption. To this end, we propose a memory usage guided fuzzing technique, named MemLock, to generate the excessive memory consumption inputs and trigger uncontrolled memory consumption bugs. The fuzzing process is guided with memory consumption information so that our approach is general and does not require any domain knowledge. We perform a thorough evaluation for MemLock on 14 widely-used real-world programs. Our experiment results show that MemLock substantially outperforms the state-of-the-art fuzzing techniques, including AFL, AFLfast, PerfFuzz, FairFuzz, Angora and QSYM, in discovering memory consumption bugs. During the experiments, we discovered many previously unknown memory consumption bugs and received 15 new CVEs.

Keywords

Fuzz Testing, Software Vulnerability, Memory Consumption

Discipline

OS and Networks | Software Engineering

Research Areas

Software and Cyber-Physical Systems

Publication

Proceedings of the 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering, Seoul, South Korea, 2020, May 23-29

First Page

765

Last Page

777

ISBN

9781450371216

Identifier

10.1145/3377811.3380396

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

City or Country

Seoul, South Korea

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