Directed Greybox Fuzzing with Stepwise Constraint Focusing

Dynamic data flow analysis has been widely used to guide greybox fuzzing. However, traditional dynamic data flow analysis tends to go astray in the massive path tracking and requires to process a large volume of data, resulting in low efficiency in reaching the target location. In this paper, we propose a directed greybox fuzzer based on dynamic constraint filtering and focusing (CONFF). First, all path constraints are tracked, and those with high priority are filtered as the next solution targets. Next, focusing on a single path constraint to be satisfied, we obtain its data condition and probe the mapping relationship between it and the input bytes through multi-byte mapping and single-byte mapping. Finally, various mutation strategies are utilized to solve the path constraint currently focused on, and the target location of the program is gradually approached through path selection. The CONFF fuzzer can reach a specific location faster in the target program, thus efficiently triggering the crash. We designed and implemented a prototype of the CONFF fuzzer and evaluated it with the LAVA-1 dataset and some real-world vulnerabilities. The results show that the CONFF fuzzer can reproduce crashes on the LAVA-1 dataset and most of the real-world vulnerabilities. For most vulnerabilities, the CONFF fuzzer reproduced the crashes with significantly reduced time compared to state-of-the-art fuzzers. On average, the CONFF fuzzer was 23.7x faster than the state-of-the-art code coverage-based fuzzer Angora and 27.3x faster than the classical directed greybox fuzzer AFLGo.