Fuzzbombing: abort() calls for great justice!

The Colossal Cave Adventure restoration is pretty much done now. One thing we’re still working on is getting test coverage of the last few corners in the code. Because when you’re up to 99.7% the temptation to push for that last 0.3% is really strong even if the attempt is objectively fairly pointless.

What’s more interesting is the technique one of our guys came up with for getting us above about 85% coverage. After that point it started to get quite difficult to hand-craft test logs to go to the places in the code that still hadn’t been exercised.

But NHorus, aka Petr Vorpaev, is expert at fuzz testing; we’ve been using American Fuzzy Lop, a well-designed, well-documented, and tasteful tool that I highly recommend. And he had an idea.

Want to get a test log that hits a particular line? Insert an abort() call right after it and rebuild. Then unleash the fuzzer. If you’ve fed it a good test corpus that gets somewhere near your target, it will probably not take long for the fuzzer to random-walk into your abort() call and record that log.

Then watch your termination times. For a while we’d generally get a result within hours, but we eventually hit a break after which the fuzzer would run for days without result. That knee in the curve is your clue that the fuzzer has done everything it can.

I dub this technique “fuzzbombing”. I think it will generalize well.