LibAFL, the fuzzer library.

Advanced Fuzzing Library - Slot your own fuzzers together and extend their features using Rust.

LibAFL is a collection of reusable pieces of fuzzers, written in Rust, it gives you many of the benefits of an off-the-shelf fuzzer, while being completely customizable. Some highlight features currently include:

• fast:We do everything we can at compile time, keeping runtime overhead minimal. Users reach 120k execs/sec in frida-mode on a phone (using all cores).
• scalable:Low Level Message Passing,LLMPfor short, allows LibAFL to scale almost linearly over cores, and via TCP to multiple machines.
• adaptable:You can replace each part of LibAFL. For example,BytesInputis just one potential form input: feel free to add an AST-based input for structured fuzzing, and more.
• multi platform:LibAFL was confirmed to work onWindows,MacOS,Linux,andAndroidonx86_64andaarch64.LibAFLcan be built inno_stdmode to inject LibAFL into obscure targets like embedded devices and hypervisors.
• bring your own target:We support binary-only modes, like Frida-Mode, as well as multiple compilation passes for sourced-based instrumentation. Of course it's easy to add custom instrumentation backends.

Core concepts

LibAFL is fast, multi-platform, no_std compatible, and scales over cores and machines. It offers a main crate that provide building blocks for custom fuzzers,libafl,a library containing common code that can be used for targets instrumentation,libafl_targets,and a library providing facilities to wrap compilers,libafl_cc.It offers integrations with popular instrumentation frameworks. At the moment, the supported backends are:

• SanitizerCoverage,inlibafl_targets
• Frida,inlibafl_frida
• QEMUuser-mode and system mode, including hooks for emulation, inlibafl_qemu
• TinyInst,inlibafl_tinyinstbyelbiazo

Building and installing

Install the Dependencies

• The Rust development language
  • We highly recommendnotto use e.g. your Linux distribution package as this is likely outdated. So rather install Rust directly, instructions can be foundhere.
• LLVM tools
  • The LLVM tools (including clang, clang++) are needed (newer than LLVM 15.0.0 up to LLVM 18.1.3) If you are using Debian/Ubuntu, again, we highly recommmend that you install the package fromhere
  • (Inlibafl_concolic,we only support LLVM version newer than 18)
• Cargo-make:
  • We use cargo-make to build the fuzzers infuzzers/directory. You can install it withcargo install cargo-make

Clone the LibAFL repository with

git clone https://github.com/AFLplusplus/LibAFL

Build the library using

cargo build --release

Build the API documentation with

cargo doc

Browse the LibAFL book (WIP!) with (requiresmdbook)

cddocs&&mdbook serve

Getting started

We collect all example fuzzers in./fuzzers. Be sure to read their documentation (and source), this isthe natural way to get started!

cargo make run

You can run each example fuzzer with this following command, as long as the fuzzer directory hasMakefile.tomlfile. The best-tested fuzzer is./fuzzers/inprocess/libfuzzer_libpng,a multicore libfuzzer-like fuzzer using LibAFL for a libpng harness.

Resources

• Installation guide
• Online API documentation
• The LibAFL book (WIP)onlineor in therepo
• Our researchpaper
• Our RC3talkexplaining the core concepts
• Our Fuzzcon Europetalkwith a (a bit but not so much outdated) step-by-step discussion on how to build some example fuzzers
• The Fuzzing101solutions& series ofblog postsbyepi
• Blogpost on binary-only fuzzing lib libaf_qemu,Hacking TMNF - Fuzzing the game server,byRickdeJager.
• A LibAFL Introductory Workshop,byJordan Whitehead

Contributors

LibAFL is written and maintained by

• Andrea Fioraldi[email protected]
• Dominik Maier[email protected]
• s1341[email protected]
• Dongjia Zhang[email protected]
• Addison Crump[email protected]
• Romain Malmain[email protected]

Please check outCONTRIBUTING.mdfor the contributing guideline.

Cite

If you use LibAFL for your academic work, please cite the following paper:

@inproceedings{libafl,
author={Andrea Fioraldi and Dominik Maier and Dongjia Zhang and Davide Balzarotti},
title={{LibAFL: A Framework to Build Modular and Reusable Fuzzers}},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 29th ACM conference on Computer and communications security (CCS)},
series={CCS '22},
year={2022},
month={November},
location={Los Angeles, U.S.A.},
publisher={ACM},
}

License

^{Licensed under either ofApache License, Version 2.0orMIT licenseat your option.}
_{Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in this crate by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.}