Multi-Node Program Fuzzing on High Performance Computing Resources
Sandia National Laboratories (SNL), Albuquerque, NM (United States). New Mexico Small Business Assistance (NMSBA) Program, NM (United States), Christian R. Cioce, USDOE Assistant Secretary for Human Resources and Administration, OGA, Nasser Salim, James Brian Rigdon, Daniel Loffredo · 2020
Significant effort is placed on tuning the internal parameters of fuzzers to explore the state space, measured as coverage, of binaries. In this work, we investigate the effects of the external environment on the resulting coverage after fuzzing two binaries with AFL for 24 hours. Parameters such as scaling to multiple nodes, node saturation, and parallel file system type on HPC resources are controlled in order to maximize coverage. It will be shown that employing a parallel file system such as IBM's General Parallel File System offers an advantage for fuzzing operations, since it contains enhancements for performance optimization. When combined with scaling to two and four nodes, while simultaneously restricting the number of coordinated AFL tasks per node on the low end (10-50% of available physical cores), coverage may be enhanced within a shorter period of time. Thus, controlling the external environment is a useful effort.