Gramatron: effective grammar-aware fuzzing

Abstract

Fuzzers aware of the input grammar can explore deeper program states using grammar-aware mutations. Existing grammar-aware fuzzers are ineffective at synthesizing complex bug triggers due to: (i) grammars introducing a sampling bias during input generation due to their structure, and (ii) the current mutation operators for parse trees performing localized small-scale changes. Gramatron uses grammar automatons in conjunction with aggressive mutation operators to synthesize complex bug triggers faster. We build grammar automatons to address the sampling bias. It restructures the grammar to allow for unbiased sampling from the input state space. We redesign grammar-aware mutation operators to be more aggressive, i.e., perform large-scale changes. Gramatron can consistently generate complex bug triggers in an efficient manner as compared to using conventional grammars with parse trees. Inputs generated from scratch by Gramatron have higher diversity as they achieve up to 24.2% more coverage relative to existing fuzzers. Gramatron makes input generation 98% faster and the input representations are 24% smaller. Our redesigned mutation operators are 6.4× more aggressive while still being 68% faster at performing these mutations. We evaluate Gramatron across three interpreters with 10 known bugs consisting of three complex bug triggers and seven simple bug triggers against two Nautilus variants. Gramatron finds all the complex bug triggers reliably and faster. For the simple bug triggers, Gramatron outperforms Nautilus four out of seven times. To demonstrate Gramatron’s effectiveness in the wild, we deployed Gramatron on three popular interpreters for a 10-day fuzzing campaign where it discovered 10 new vulnerabilities.