FirmAFL: high-throughput greybox fuzzer for IoT firmware
FIRM-AFL
FIRM-AFL is the first high-throughput greybox fuzzer for IoT firmware. FIRM-AFL addresses two fundamental problems in IoT fuzzing. First, it addresses compatibility issues by enabling fuzzing for POSIX-compatible firmware that can be emulated in a system emulator. Second, it addresses the performance bottleneck caused by system-mode emulation with a novel technique called “augmented process emulation”. By combining system-mode emulation and user-mode emulation in a novel way, augmented process emulation provides high compatibility as system-mode emulation and high throughput as user-mode emulation.
We design and implement FIRM-AFL, an enhancement of AFL for fuzzing IoT firmware. We keep the workflow of AFL intact and replace the user-mode QEMU with augmented process emulation, and the rest of the components remain unchanged.
