ProFuzzBench

ProFuzzBench is a benchmark for stateful fuzzing of network protocols. It includes a suite of representative open-source network servers for popular protocols (e.g., TLS, SSH, SMTP, FTP, SIP), and tools to automate experimentation.

Citing ProFuzzBench

We have published a technical report for ProFuzzBench.

@misc{profuzzbench,
      title={ProFuzzBench: A Benchmark for Stateful Protocol Fuzzing},
      author={Roberto Natella and Van-Thuan Pham},
      year={2021},
      eprint={2101.05102},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.CR}
}

Folder structure

protocol-fuzzing-benchmark
├── subjects: this folder contains all protocols included in this benchmark and
│   │         each protocol may have more than one target server
│   └── RTSP
│   └── FTP
│   │   └── LightFTP
│   │       └── Dockerfile: subject-specific Dockerfile
│   │       └── run.sh: (subject-specific) main script to run experiment inside a container
│   │       └── cov_script.sh: (subject-specific) script to do code coverage analysis
│   │       └── other files (e.g., patches, other subject-specific scripts)
│   └── ...
└── scripts: this folder contains all scripts to run experiments, collect & analyze results
│   └── execution
│   │   └── profuzzbench_exec_common.sh: main script to spawn containers and run experiments on them
│   │   └── ...
│   └── analysis
│       └── profuzzbench_generate_csv.sh: this script collect code coverage results from different runs
│       └── profuzzbench_plot.py: sample script for plotting
└── README.md

Tutorial - Fuzzing LightFTP server with AFLNet and AFLnwe, a network-enabled version of AFL

Follow the steps below to run and collect experimental results for LightFTP, which is a lightweight File Transfer Protocol (FTP) server. The similar steps should be followed to run experiments on other subjects. Each subject program comes with a README.md file showing subject-specific commands to run experiments.

Step-0. Set up environmental variables

git clone https://github.com/profuzzbench/profuzzbench.git
cd profuzzbench
export PFBENCH=$(pwd)
export PATH=$PATH:$PFBENCH/scripts/execution:$PFBENCH/scripts/analysis

Step-1. Build a docker image

The following commands create a docker image tagged lightftp. The image should have everything available for fuzzing and code coverage collection.

cd $PFBENCH
cd subjects/FTP/LightFTP
docker build . -t lightftp

Step-2. Run fuzzing

Run profuzzbench_exec_common.sh script to start an experiment. The script takes 8 arguments as listed below.

  • 1st argument (DOCIMAGE) : name of the docker image
  • 2nd argument (RUNS) : number of runs, one isolated Docker container is spawned for each run
  • 3rd argument (SAVETO) : path to a folder keeping the results
  • 4th argument (FUZZER) : fuzzer name (e.g., aflnet) -- this name must match the name of the fuzzer folder inside the Docker container (e.g., /home/ubuntu/aflnet)
  • 5th argument (OUTDIR) : name of the output folder created inside the docker container
  • 6th argument (OPTIONS) : all options needed for fuzzing in addition to the standard options written in the target-specific run.sh script
  • 7th argument (TIMEOUT) : time for fuzzing in seconds
  • 8th argument (SKIPCOUNT): used for calculating coverage over time. e.g., SKIPCOUNT=5 means we run gcovr after every 5 test cases because gcovr takes time and we do not want to run it after every single test case

The following commands run 4 instances of AFLNet and 4 instances of AFLnwe to simultaenously fuzz LightFTP in 60 minutes.

cd $PFBENCH
mkdir results-lightftp

profuzzbench_exec_common.sh lightftp 4 results-lightftp aflnet out-lightftp-aflnet "-P FTP -D 10000 -q 3 -s 3 -E -K -c ./ftpclean.sh" 3600 5 &
profuzzbench_exec_common.sh lightftp 4 results-lightftp aflnwe out-lightftp-aflnwe "-D 10000 -K -c ./ftpclean.sh" 3600 5

If the script runs successfully, its output should look similar to the text below.

AFLNET: Fuzzing in progress ...
AFLNET: Waiting for the following containers to stop:  f2da4b72b002 b7421386b288 cebbbc741f93 5c54104ddb86
AFLNET: Collecting results and save them to results-lightftp
AFLNET: Collecting results from container f2da4b72b002
AFLNET: Collecting results from container b7421386b288
AFLNET: Collecting results from container cebbbc741f93
AFLNET: Collecting results from container 5c54104ddb86
AFLNET: I am done!

Step-3. Collect the results

All results (in tar files) should be stored in the folder created in Step-2 (results-lightftp). Specifically, these tar files are the compressed version of output folders produced by all fuzzing instances. If the fuzzer is afl based (e.g., AFLNet, AFLnwe) each folder should contain sub-folders like crashes, hangs, queue and so on. Use profuzzbench_generate_csv.sh script to collect results in terms of code coverage over time. The script takes 5 arguments as listed below.

  • 1st argument (PROG) : name of the subject program (e.g., lightftp)
  • 2nd argument (RUNS) : number of runs
  • 3rd argument (FUZZER) : fuzzer name (e.g., aflnet)
  • 4th argument (COVFILE): CSV-formatted output file keeping the results
  • 5th argument (APPEND) : append mode; set this to 0 for the first fuzzer and 1 for the subsequent fuzzer(s).

The following commands collect the code coverage results produced by AFLNet and AFLnwe and save them to results.csv.

cd $PFBENCH/results-lightftp

profuzzbench_generate_csv.sh lightftp 4 aflnet results.csv 0
profuzzbench_generate_csv.sh lightftp 4 aflnwe results.csv 1

The results.csv file should look similar to text below. The file has six columns showing the timestamp, subject program, fuzzer name, run index, coverage type and its value. The file contains both line coverage and branch coverage over time information. Each coverage type comes with two values, in percentage (_per) and in absolute number (_abs).

time,subject,fuzzer,run,cov_type,cov
1600905795,lightftp,aflnwe,1,l_per,25.9
1600905795,lightftp,aflnwe,1,l_abs,292
1600905795,lightftp,aflnwe,1,b_per,13.3
1600905795,lightftp,aflnwe,1,b_abs,108
1600905795,lightftp,aflnwe,1,l_per,25.9
1600905795,lightftp,aflnwe,1,l_abs,292

Step-4. Analyze the results

The results collected in step 3 (i.e., results.csv) can be used for plotting. For instance, we provide a sample Python script to plot code coverage over time. Use the following command to plot the results and save it to a file.

cd $PFBENCH/results-lightftp

profuzzbench_plot.py -i results.csv -p lightftp -r 4 -c 60 -s 1 -o cov_over_time.png

This is a sample code coverage report generated by the script.

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