5 This document describes the virtual-device fuzzing infrastructure in QEMU and
6 how to use it to implement additional fuzzers.
11 Fuzzing operates by passing inputs to an entry point/target function. The
12 fuzzer tracks the code coverage triggered by the input. Based on these
13 findings, the fuzzer mutates the input and repeats the fuzzing.
15 To fuzz QEMU, we rely on libfuzzer. Unlike other fuzzers such as AFL, libfuzzer
16 is an *in-process* fuzzer. For the developer, this means that it is their
17 responsibility to ensure that state is reset between fuzzing-runs.
22 To build the fuzzers, install a recent version of clang:
23 Configure with (substitute the clang binaries with the version you installed).
24 Here, enable-asan and enable-ubsan are optional but they allow us to reliably
25 detect bugs such as out-of-bounds accesses, uses-after-free, double-frees
28 CC=clang-8 CXX=clang++-8 /path/to/configure \
29 --enable-fuzzing --enable-asan --enable-ubsan
31 Fuzz targets are built similarly to system targets::
35 This builds ``./qemu-fuzz-i386``
37 The first option to this command is: ``--fuzz-target=FUZZ_NAME``
38 To list all of the available fuzzers run ``qemu-fuzz-i386`` with no arguments.
42 ./qemu-fuzz-i386 --fuzz-target=virtio-scsi-fuzz
44 Internally, libfuzzer parses all arguments that do not begin with ``"--"``.
45 Information about these is available by passing ``-help=1``
47 Now the only thing left to do is wait for the fuzzer to trigger potential
50 Useful libFuzzer flags
51 ----------------------
53 As mentioned above, libFuzzer accepts some arguments. Passing ``-help=1`` will
54 list the available arguments. In particular, these arguments might be helpful:
56 * ``CORPUS_DIR/`` : Specify a directory as the last argument to libFuzzer.
57 libFuzzer stores each "interesting" input in this corpus directory. The next
58 time you run libFuzzer, it will read all of the inputs from the corpus, and
59 continue fuzzing from there. You can also specify multiple directories.
60 libFuzzer loads existing inputs from all specified directories, but will only
61 write new ones to the first one specified.
63 * ``-max_len=4096`` : specify the maximum byte-length of the inputs libFuzzer
66 * ``-close_fd_mask={1,2,3}`` : close, stderr, or both. Useful for targets that
67 trigger many debug/error messages, or create output on the serial console.
69 * ``-jobs=4 -workers=4`` : These arguments configure libFuzzer to run 4 fuzzers in
70 parallel (4 fuzzing jobs in 4 worker processes). Alternatively, with only
71 ``-jobs=N``, libFuzzer automatically spawns a number of workers less than or equal
72 to half the available CPU cores. Replace 4 with a number appropriate for your
73 machine. Make sure to specify a ``CORPUS_DIR``, which will allow the parallel
74 fuzzers to share information about the interesting inputs they find.
76 * ``-use_value_profile=1`` : For each comparison operation, libFuzzer computes
77 ``(caller_pc&4095) | (popcnt(Arg1 ^ Arg2) << 12)`` and places this in the
78 coverage table. Useful for targets with "magic" constants. If Arg1 came from
79 the fuzzer's input and Arg2 is a magic constant, then each time the Hamming
80 distance between Arg1 and Arg2 decreases, libFuzzer adds the input to the
83 * ``-shrink=1`` : Tries to make elements of the corpus "smaller". Might lead to
84 better coverage performance, depending on the target.
86 Note that libFuzzer's exact behavior will depend on the version of
87 clang and libFuzzer used to build the device fuzzers.
89 Generating Coverage Reports
90 ---------------------------
92 Code coverage is a crucial metric for evaluating a fuzzer's performance.
93 libFuzzer's output provides a "cov: " column that provides a total number of
94 unique blocks/edges covered. To examine coverage on a line-by-line basis we
95 can use Clang coverage:
97 1. Configure libFuzzer to store a corpus of all interesting inputs (see
99 2. ``./configure`` the QEMU build with ::
102 --extra-cflags="-fprofile-instr-generate -fcoverage-mapping"
104 3. Re-run the fuzzer. Specify $CORPUS_DIR/* as an argument, telling libfuzzer
105 to execute all of the inputs in $CORPUS_DIR and exit. Once the process
106 exits, you should find a file, "default.profraw" in the working directory.
107 4. Execute these commands to generate a detailed HTML coverage-report::
109 llvm-profdata merge -output=default.profdata default.profraw
110 llvm-cov show ./path/to/qemu-fuzz-i386 -instr-profile=default.profdata \
111 --format html -output-dir=/path/to/output/report
116 Coverage over virtual devices can be improved by adding additional fuzzers.
117 Fuzzers are kept in ``tests/qtest/fuzz/`` and should be added to
118 ``tests/qtest/fuzz/meson.build``
120 Fuzzers can rely on both qtest and libqos to communicate with virtual devices.
122 1. Create a new source file. For example ``tests/qtest/fuzz/foo-device-fuzz.c``.
124 2. Write the fuzzing code using the libqtest/libqos API. See existing fuzzers
127 3. Add the fuzzer to ``tests/qtest/fuzz/meson.build``.
129 Fuzzers can be more-or-less thought of as special qtest programs which can
130 modify the qtest commands and/or qtest command arguments based on inputs
131 provided by libfuzzer. Libfuzzer passes a byte array and length. Commonly the
132 fuzzer loops over the byte-array interpreting it as a list of qtest commands,
133 addresses, or values.
138 Writing a fuzz target can be a lot of effort (especially if a device driver has
139 not be built-out within libqos). Many devices can be fuzzed to some degree,
140 without any device-specific code, using the generic-fuzz target.
142 The generic-fuzz target is capable of fuzzing devices over their PIO, MMIO,
143 and DMA input-spaces. To apply the generic-fuzz to a device, we need to define
144 two env-variables, at minimum:
146 * ``QEMU_FUZZ_ARGS=`` is the set of QEMU arguments used to configure a machine, with
147 the device attached. For example, if we want to fuzz the virtio-net device
148 attached to a pc-i440fx machine, we can specify::
150 QEMU_FUZZ_ARGS="-M pc -nodefaults -netdev user,id=user0 \
151 -device virtio-net,netdev=user0"
153 * ``QEMU_FUZZ_OBJECTS=`` is a set of space-delimited strings used to identify
154 the MemoryRegions that will be fuzzed. These strings are compared against
155 MemoryRegion names and MemoryRegion owner names, to decide whether each
156 MemoryRegion should be fuzzed. These strings support globbing. For the
157 virtio-net example, we could use one of ::
159 QEMU_FUZZ_OBJECTS='virtio-net'
160 QEMU_FUZZ_OBJECTS='virtio*'
161 QEMU_FUZZ_OBJECTS='virtio* pcspk' # Fuzz the virtio devices and the speaker
162 QEMU_FUZZ_OBJECTS='*' # Fuzz the whole machine``
164 The ``"info mtree"`` and ``"info qom-tree"`` monitor commands can be especially
165 useful for identifying the ``MemoryRegion`` and ``Object`` names used for
168 As a generic rule-of-thumb, the more ``MemoryRegions``/Devices we match, the
169 greater the input-space, and the smaller the probability of finding crashing
170 inputs for individual devices. As such, it is usually a good idea to limit the
171 fuzzer to only a few ``MemoryRegions``.
173 To ensure that these env variables have been configured correctly, we can use::
175 ./qemu-fuzz-i386 --fuzz-target=generic-fuzz -runs=0
177 The output should contain a complete list of matched MemoryRegions.
181 QEMU is continuously fuzzed on `OSS-Fuzz
182 <https://github.com/google/oss-fuzz>`_. By default, the OSS-Fuzz build
183 will try to fuzz every fuzz-target. Since the generic-fuzz target
184 requires additional information provided in environment variables, we
185 pre-define some generic-fuzz configs in
186 ``tests/qtest/fuzz/generic_fuzz_configs.h``. Each config must specify:
188 - ``.name``: To identify the fuzzer config
190 - ``.args`` OR ``.argfunc``: A string or pointer to a function returning a
191 string. These strings are used to specify the ``QEMU_FUZZ_ARGS``
192 environment variable. ``argfunc`` is useful when the config relies on e.g.
193 a dynamically created temp directory, or a free tcp/udp port.
195 - ``.objects``: A string that specifies the ``QEMU_FUZZ_OBJECTS`` environment
198 To fuzz additional devices/device configuration on OSS-Fuzz, send patches for
199 either a new device-specific fuzzer or a new generic-fuzz config.
203 - The Dockerfile that sets up the environment for building QEMU's
204 fuzzers on OSS-Fuzz can be fund in the OSS-Fuzz repository
205 __(https://github.com/google/oss-fuzz/blob/master/projects/qemu/Dockerfile)
207 - The script responsible for building the fuzzers can be found in the
208 QEMU source tree at ``scripts/oss-fuzz/build.sh``
210 Building Crash Reproducers
211 -----------------------------------------
212 When we find a crash, we should try to create an independent reproducer, that
213 can be used on a non-fuzzer build of QEMU. This filters out any potential
214 false-positives, and improves the debugging experience for developers.
215 Here are the steps for building a reproducer for a crash found by the
218 - Ensure the crash reproduces::
220 qemu-fuzz-i386 --fuzz-target... ./crash-...
222 - Gather the QTest output for the crash::
224 QEMU_FUZZ_TIMEOUT=0 QTEST_LOG=1 FUZZ_SERIALIZE_QTEST=1 \
225 qemu-fuzz-i386 --fuzz-target... ./crash-... &> /tmp/trace
227 - Reorder and clean-up the resulting trace::
229 scripts/oss-fuzz/reorder_fuzzer_qtest_trace.py /tmp/trace > /tmp/reproducer
231 - Get the arguments needed to start qemu, and provide a path to qemu::
233 less /tmp/trace # The args should be logged at the top of this file
234 export QEMU_ARGS="-machine ..."
235 export QEMU_PATH="path/to/qemu-system"
237 - Ensure the crash reproduces in qemu-system::
239 $QEMU_PATH $QEMU_ARGS -qtest stdio < /tmp/reproducer
241 - From the crash output, obtain some string that identifies the crash. This
242 can be a line in the stack-trace, for example::
244 export CRASH_TOKEN="hw/usb/hcd-xhci.c:1865"
246 - Minimize the reproducer::
248 scripts/oss-fuzz/minimize_qtest_trace.py -M1 -M2 \
249 /tmp/reproducer /tmp/reproducer-minimized
251 - Confirm that the minimized reproducer still crashes::
253 $QEMU_PATH $QEMU_ARGS -qtest stdio < /tmp/reproducer-minimized
255 - Create a one-liner reproducer that can be sent over email::
257 ./scripts/oss-fuzz/output_reproducer.py -bash /tmp/reproducer-minimized
259 - Output the C source code for a test case that will reproduce the bug::
261 ./scripts/oss-fuzz/output_reproducer.py -owner "John Smith <john@smith.com>"\
262 -name "test_function_name" /tmp/reproducer-minimized
264 - Report the bug and send a patch with the C reproducer upstream
266 Implementation Details / Fuzzer Lifecycle
267 -----------------------------------------
269 The fuzzer has two entrypoints that libfuzzer calls. libfuzzer provides it's
270 own ``main()``, which performs some setup, and calls the entrypoints:
272 ``LLVMFuzzerInitialize``: called prior to fuzzing. Used to initialize all of the
275 ``LLVMFuzzerTestOneInput``: called for each fuzzing run. Processes the input and
276 resets the state at the end of each run.
280 ``LLVMFuzzerInitialize`` parses the arguments to the fuzzer (must start with two
281 dashes, so they are ignored by libfuzzer ``main()``). Currently, the arguments
282 select the fuzz target. Then, the qtest client is initialized. If the target
283 requires qos, qgraph is set up and the QOM/LIBQOS modules are initialized.
284 Then the QGraph is walked and the QEMU cmd_line is determined and saved.
286 After this, the ``vl.c:main`` is called to set up the guest. There are
287 target-specific hooks that can be called before and after main, for
288 additional setup(e.g. PCI setup, or VM snapshotting).
290 ``LLVMFuzzerTestOneInput``: Uses qtest/qos functions to act based on the fuzz
291 input. It is also responsible for manually calling ``main_loop_wait`` to ensure
292 that bottom halves are executed and any cleanup required before the next input.
294 Since the same process is reused for many fuzzing runs, QEMU state needs to
295 be reset at the end of each run. For example, this can be done by rebooting the
298 - *Pros*: Straightforward and fast for simple fuzz targets.
300 - *Cons*: Depending on the device, does not reset all device state. If the
301 device requires some initialization prior to being ready for fuzzing (common
302 for QOS-based targets), this initialization needs to be done after each
305 - *Example target*: ``i440fx-qtest-reboot-fuzz``