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diff --git a/docs/interpreting_output.md b/docs/interpreting_output.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..54ad76df --- /dev/null +++ b/docs/interpreting_output.md @@ -0,0 +1,71 @@ +# Interpreting output + +See the [docs/status_screen.md](docs/status_screen.md) file for information on +how to interpret the displayed stats and monitor the health of the process. Be +sure to consult this file especially if any UI elements are highlighted in red. + +The fuzzing process will continue until you press Ctrl-C. At a minimum, you want +to allow the fuzzer to complete one queue cycle, which may take anywhere from a +couple of hours to a week or so. + +There are three subdirectories created within the output directory and updated +in real-time: + + - queue/ - test cases for every distinctive execution path, plus all the + starting files given by the user. This is the synthesized corpus + mentioned in section 2. + + Before using this corpus for any other purposes, you can shrink + it to a smaller size using the afl-cmin tool. The tool will find + a smaller subset of files offering equivalent edge coverage. + + - crashes/ - unique test cases that cause the tested program to receive a + fatal signal (e.g., SIGSEGV, SIGILL, SIGABRT). The entries are + grouped by the received signal. + + - hangs/ - unique test cases that cause the tested program to time out. The + default time limit before something is classified as a hang is + the larger of 1 second and the value of the -t parameter. + The value can be fine-tuned by setting AFL_HANG_TMOUT, but this + is rarely necessary. + +Crashes and hangs are considered "unique" if the associated execution paths +involve any state transitions not seen in previously-recorded faults. If a +single bug can be reached in multiple ways, there will be some count inflation +early in the process, but this should quickly taper off. + +The file names for crashes and hangs are correlated with the parent, non-faulting +queue entries. This should help with debugging. + +When you can't reproduce a crash found by afl-fuzz, the most likely cause is +that you are not setting the same memory limit as used by the tool. Try: + +```shell +LIMIT_MB=50 +( ulimit -Sv $[LIMIT_MB << 10]; /path/to/tested_binary ... ) +``` + +Change LIMIT_MB to match the -m parameter passed to afl-fuzz. On OpenBSD, +also change -Sv to -Sd. + +Any existing output directory can be also used to resume aborted jobs; try: + +```shell +./afl-fuzz -i- -o existing_output_dir [...etc...] +``` + +If you have gnuplot installed, you can also generate some pretty graphs for any +active fuzzing task using afl-plot. For an example of how this looks like, +see [http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/afl/plot/](http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/afl/plot/). + +You can also manually build and install afl-plot-ui, which is a helper utility +for showing the graphs generated by afl-plot in a graphical window using GTK. +You can build and install it as follows + +```shell +sudo apt install libgtk-3-0 libgtk-3-dev pkg-config +cd utils/plot_ui +make +cd ../../ +sudo make install +``` \ No newline at end of file |