Efficient Binary-Level Coverage Analysis
This work addresses the need for efficient and scalable coverage analysis in software testing, particularly for feedback-guided fuzzing, but it is incremental as it builds on existing techniques like probe pruning and jump table analysis.
The paper tackles the problem of binary-level coverage analysis for software testing by introducing bcov, a tool that statically instruments x86-64 binaries without compiler support, achieving average performance and memory overheads of 14% and 22% with high accuracy (average F-score of 99.86%).
Code coverage analysis plays an important role in the software testing process. More recently, the remarkable effectiveness of coverage feedback has triggered a broad interest in feedback-guided fuzzing. In this work, we introduce bcov, a tool for binary-level coverage analysis. Our tool statically instruments x86-64 binaries in the ELF format without compiler support. We implement several techniques to improve efficiency and scale to large real-world software. First, we bring Agrawal's probe pruning technique to binary-level instrumentation and effectively leverage its superblocks to reduce overhead. Second, we introduce sliced microexecution, a robust technique for jump table analysis which improves CFG precision and enables us to instrument jump table entries. Additionally, smaller instructions in x86-64 pose a challenge for inserting detours. To address this challenge, we aggressively exploit padding bytes and systematically host detours in neighboring basic blocks. We evaluate bcov on a corpus of 95 binaries compiled from eight popular and well-tested packages like FFmpeg and LLVM. Two instrumentation policies, with different edge-level precision, are used to patch all functions in this corpus - over 1.6 million functions. Our precise policy has average performance and memory overheads of 14% and 22% respectively. Instrumented binaries do not introduce any test regressions. The reported coverage is highly accurate with an average F-score of 99.86%. Finally, our jump table analysis is comparable to that of IDA Pro on gcc binaries and outperforms it on clang binaries.