Announcing OSS-Fuzz: Continuous fuzzing for open source software
From the post:
We are happy to announce OSS-Fuzz, a new Beta program developed over the past years with the Core Infrastructure Initiative community. This program will provide continuous fuzzing for select core open source software.
Open source software is the backbone of the many apps, sites, services, and networked things that make up “the internet.” It is important that the open source foundation be stable, secure, and reliable, as cracks and weaknesses impact all who build on it.
Recent security stories confirm that errors like buffer overflow and use-after-free can have serious, widespread consequences when they occur in critical open source software. These errors are not only serious, but notoriously difficult to find via routine code audits, even for experienced developers. That’s where fuzz testing comes in. By generating random inputs to a given program, fuzzing triggers and helps uncover errors quickly and thoroughly.
In recent years, several efficient general purpose fuzzing engines have been implemented (e.g. AFL and libFuzzer), and we use them to fuzz various components of the Chrome browser. These fuzzers, when combined with Sanitizers, can help find security vulnerabilities (e.g. buffer overflows, use-after-free, bad casts, integer overflows, etc), stability bugs (e.g. null dereferences, memory leaks, out-of-memory, assertion failures, etc) and sometimes even logical bugs.
OSS-Fuzz’s goal is to make common software infrastructure more secure and stable by combining modern fuzzing techniques with scalable distributed execution. OSS-Fuzz combines various fuzzing engines (initially, libFuzzer) with Sanitizers (initially, AddressSanitizer) and provides a massive distributed execution environment powered by ClusterFuzz.
… (emphasis in original)
Another similarity between open and closed source software.
Closed source software is continuously being fuzzed.
By volunteers.
Yes? 😉
One starting place for more information: Effective file format fuzzing by Mateusz “j00ru” Jurczyk (Black Hat Europe 2016, London) and his website: http://j00ru.vexillium.org/.