Blackbox Fuzzing of Distributed Systems with Multi-Dimensional Inputs and Symmetry-Based Feedback Pruning

Yonghao Zou (Beihang University and Peking University), Jia-Ju Bai (Beihang University), Zu-Ming Jiang (ETH Zurich), Ming Zhao (Arizona State University), Diyu Zhou (Peking University)

This paper presents DistFuzz, which, to our knowledge, is the first feedback-guided blackbox fuzzing framework for distributed systems. The novelty of DistFuzz comes from two conceptual contributions on key aspects of distributed system fuzzing: the input space and feedback metrics. Specifically, unlike prior work that focuses on systematically mutating faults, exploiting the request-driven and timing-dependence nature of distributed systems, DistFuzz proposes a multi-dimensional input space by incorporating regular events and relative timing among events as the other two dimensions. Furthermore, observing that important state changes in distributed systems can be indicated by network messages among nodes, DistFuzz utilizes the sequences of network messages with symmetry-based pruning as program feedback, which departs from the conventional wisdom that effective feedback requires code instrumentation/analysis and/or user inputs. DistFuzz finds 52 real bugs in ten popular distributed systems in C/C++, Go, and Java. Among these bugs, 28 have been confirmed by the developers, 20 were unknown before, and 4 have been assigned with CVEs.

Paper

Slides

Video

View More Papers

Secure IP Address Allocation at Cloud Scale

Eric Pauley (University of Wisconsin–Madison), Kyle Domico (University of Wisconsin–Madison), Blaine Hoak (University of Wisconsin–Madison), Ryan Sheatsley (University of Wisconsin–Madison), Quinn Burke (University of Wisconsin–Madison), Yohan Beugin (University of Wisconsin–Madison), Engin Kirda (Northeastern University), Patrick McDaniel (University of Wisconsin–Madison)

Kronos: A Secure and Generic Sharding Blockchain Consensus with...

Yizhong Liu (Beihang University), Andi Liu (Beihang University), Yuan Lu (Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Sciences), Zhuocheng Pan (Beihang University), Yinuo Li (Xi’an Jiaotong University), Jianwei Liu (Beihang University), Song Bian (Beihang University), Mauro Conti (University of Padua)

Passive Inference Attacks on Split Learning via Adversarial Regularization

Xiaochen Zhu (National University of Singapore & Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Xinjian Luo (National University of Singapore & Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence), Yuncheng Wu (Renmin University of China), Yangfan Jiang (National University of Singapore), Xiaokui Xiao (National University of Singapore), Beng Chin Ooi (National University of Singapore)