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Re: Bugs found by Cryptofuzz - some missing CVEs or too low impact for CVE?
From: Seth Arnold <seth.arnold () canonical com>
Date: Tue, 8 Dec 2020 22:35:58 +0000
On Tue, Dec 08, 2020 at 05:18:04PM -0500, Robert Watson wrote:
Question from a retired programmer but security novice... Since fuzzing is used to find bugs in other programs, doesn't it need to be held to a bit higher standard in order to maintain credibility?
The output from fuzzers is a large body of inputs (or programs, in the case of syzkaller) that directly demonstrate the problem in the program being fuzzed. The generated inputs can be used separately from the fuzzing framework. Many are only useful when combined with sanitizers, or debug builds, or similar efforts to turn errors into something visible (corrupting the stack may not be visible directly, for example). It's unfortunate that this step is required, and I have seen maintainers not interested in taking fixes that are "only visible with ubsan", for example, but this attitude is thankfully rare. Developers can keep these example inputs for their test suites, CI / CD systems, etc, and make sure that their programs don't fail on these inputs in the future, too. This does put a lot of trust into the sanitizers but compilers tend to have pretty good test suites. Afterall, they, too, are fuzzed, and automated tooling like csmith, creduce, delta, cvise, and probably more, can help find minimal test cases. The most difficult part of working with fuzzers, in my opinion, is that it can take a long time to figure out the cause of a crash or sanitizer alert. Often finding the causes, or to propose a fix, takes longer than finding issues. Thanks
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Current thread:
- Bugs found by Cryptofuzz - some missing CVEs or too low impact for CVE? yersinia (Dec 08)
- Re: Bugs found by Cryptofuzz - some missing CVEs or too low impact for CVE? Eric Biggers (Dec 08)
- Re: Bugs found by Cryptofuzz - some missing CVEs or too low impact for CVE? Robert Watson (Dec 08)
- Re: Bugs found by Cryptofuzz - some missing CVEs or too low impact for CVE? Seth Arnold (Dec 08)
- Re: Bugs found by Cryptofuzz - some missing CVEs or too low impact for CVE? Douglas Bagnall (Dec 15)
- Re: Bugs found by Cryptofuzz - some missing CVEs or too low impact for CVE? Robert Watson (Dec 08)
- Re: Bugs found by Cryptofuzz - some missing CVEs or too low impact for CVE? Eric Biggers (Dec 08)