DeepGo: Predictive Directed Greybox Fuzzing
This work addresses a bottleneck in software testing for security researchers by enhancing directed fuzzing efficiency, though it is incremental as it builds on existing DGF methods.
The paper tackles the inefficiency of Directed Greybox Fuzzing (DGF) in reaching target sites due to reliance on heuristic algorithms, by proposing DeepGo, a predictive fuzzer that uses deep neural networks and reinforcement learning to guide mutations via optimal paths, resulting in improved efficiency in reaching targets.
The state-of-the-art DGF techniques redefine and optimize the fitness metric to reach the target sites precisely and quickly. However, optimizations for fitness metrics are mainly based on heuristic algorithms, which usually rely on historical execution information and lack foresight on paths that have not been exercised yet. Thus, those hard-to-execute paths with complex constraints would hinder DGF from reaching the targets, making DGF less efficient. In this paper, we propose DeepGo, a predictive directed grey-box fuzzer that can combine historical and predicted information to steer DGF to reach the target site via an optimal path. We first propose the path transition model, which models DGF as a process of reaching the target site through specific path transition sequences. The new seed generated by mutation would cause the path transition, and the path corresponding to the high-reward path transition sequence indicates a high likelihood of reaching the target site through it. Then, to predict the path transitions and the corresponding rewards, we use deep neural networks to construct a Virtual Ensemble Environment (VEE), which gradually imitates the path transition model and predicts the rewards of path transitions that have not been taken yet. To determine the optimal path, we develop a Reinforcement Learning for Fuzzing (RLF) model to generate the transition sequences with the highest sequence rewards. The RLF model can combine historical and predicted path transitions to generate the optimal path transition sequences, along with the policy to guide the mutation strategy of fuzzing. Finally, to exercise the high-reward path transition sequence, we propose the concept of an action group, which comprehensively optimizes the critical steps of fuzzing to realize the optimal path to reach the target efficiently.