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On Designing an Efficient Distributed Black-Box Fuzzing System for Mobile Devices

Published: 14 April 2015 Publication History

Abstract

Security researchers who jailbreak iOS devices have usually crowdsourced for system level vulnerabilities [1] for iOS. However, their success has depended on whether a particular device owner encountered a crash in system-level code. To conduct voluntary security testing, black-box fuzzing is one of the ideal low-cost and simple techniques to find system level vulnerabilities for the less technical crowd. However, it is not the most effective method due to the large fuzzing space. At the same time, when fuzzing mobile devices such as today's smartphones, it is extremely time consuming to instrument mobile devices of varying versions of system software across the world. This paper, describes Mobile Vulnerability Discovery Pipeline (MVDP), a semi-automated, vulnerability discovery pipeline for mobile devices. MVDP is a carefully crafted process targeted to produce malicious output that is very likely to crash the target leading to vulnerability discovery. MVDP employs a few novel black-box fuzzing techniques such as distributed fuzzing, parameter selection, mutation position optimisation and selection of good seed files. To date, MVDP has discovered around 1900 unique crashing inputs and helped to identify 7 unique vulnerabilities across various Android and iOS phone models.

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Cited By

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  • (2021)Dependability Assessment of the Android OS Through Fault InjectionIEEE Transactions on Reliability10.1109/TR.2019.295438470:1(346-361)Online publication date: Mar-2021
  • (2019) File Guard: automatic format-based media file sanitizationInternational Journal of Information Security10.1007/s10207-019-00440-318:6(701-713)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2019
  • (2017)The Fuzzing Awakens: File Format-Aware Mutational Fuzzing on Smartphone Media Server DaemonsICT Systems Security and Privacy Protection10.1007/978-3-319-58469-0_15(219-232)Online publication date: 4-May-2017

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cover image ACM Conferences
ASIA CCS '15: Proceedings of the 10th ACM Symposium on Information, Computer and Communications Security
April 2015
698 pages
ISBN:9781450332453
DOI:10.1145/2714576
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Publication History

Published: 14 April 2015

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Author Tags

  1. black-box fuzzing
  2. crash analysis
  3. smartphones
  4. zero-day vulnerability

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  • Research-article

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ASIA CCS '15
Sponsor:
ASIA CCS '15: 10th ACM Symposium on Information, Computer and Communications Security
April 14 - March 17, 2015
Singapore, Republic of Singapore

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ASIA CCS '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 48 of 269 submissions, 18%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 418 of 2,322 submissions, 18%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2021)Dependability Assessment of the Android OS Through Fault InjectionIEEE Transactions on Reliability10.1109/TR.2019.295438470:1(346-361)Online publication date: Mar-2021
  • (2019) File Guard: automatic format-based media file sanitizationInternational Journal of Information Security10.1007/s10207-019-00440-318:6(701-713)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2019
  • (2017)The Fuzzing Awakens: File Format-Aware Mutational Fuzzing on Smartphone Media Server DaemonsICT Systems Security and Privacy Protection10.1007/978-3-319-58469-0_15(219-232)Online publication date: 4-May-2017

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