Icicle: A Re-designed Emulator for Grey-Box Firmware Fuzzing
Michael Chesser, Surya Nepal, Damith Chinthana Ranasinghe · 2023
Emulation-based fuzzers enable testing binaries without source code and facilitate testing embedded applications where automated execution on the target hardware architecture is difficult and slow. The instrumentation techniques added to extract feedback and guide input mutations towards generating effective test cases is at the core of modern fuzzers. But, modern emulation-based fuzzers have evolved by re-purposing general-purpose emulators; consequently, developing and integrating fuzzing techniques, such as instrumentation methods, is difficult and often added in an ad-hoc manner, specific to an instruction set architecture (ISA). This limits state-of-the-art fuzzing techniques to a few ISAs such as x86/x86-64 or ARM/AArch64; a significant problem for firmware fuzzing of diverse ISAs.