aboutsummaryrefslogtreecommitdiff
path: root/docs
diff options
context:
space:
mode:
Diffstat (limited to 'docs')
-rw-r--r--docs/unicorn_mode.txt109
1 files changed, 0 insertions, 109 deletions
diff --git a/docs/unicorn_mode.txt b/docs/unicorn_mode.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index b691fff8..00000000
--- a/docs/unicorn_mode.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,109 +0,0 @@
-=========================================================
-Unicorn-based binary-only instrumentation for afl-fuzz
-=========================================================
-
-1) Introduction
----------------
-
-The code in ./unicorn_mode allows you to build a standalone feature that
-leverages the Unicorn Engine and allows callers to obtain instrumentation
-output for black-box, closed-source binary code snippets. This mechanism
-can be then used by afl-fuzz to stress-test targets that couldn't be built
-with afl-gcc or used in QEMU mode, or with other extensions such as
-TriforceAFL.
-
-There is a significant performance penalty compared to native AFL,
-but at least we're able to use AFL on these binaries, right?
-
-The idea and much of the implementation comes from Nathan Voss <njvoss299@gmail.com>.
-
-2) How to use
--------------
-
-Requirements: you need an installed python2 environment.
-
-*** Building AFL's Unicorn Mode ***
-
-First, make afl as usual.
-Once that completes successfully you need to build and add in the Unicorn Mode
-features:
-
- $ cd unicorn_mode
- $ ./build_unicorn_support.sh
-
-NOTE: This script downloads a recent Unicorn Engine commit that has been tested
-and is stable-ish from the Unicorn github page. If you are offline, you'll need
-to hack up this script a little bit and supply your own copy of Unicorn's latest
-stable release. It's not very hard, just check out the beginning of the
-build_unicorn_support.sh script and adjust as necessary.
-
-Building Unicorn will take a little bit (~5-10 minutes). Once it completes
-it automatically compiles a sample application and verify that it works.
-
-*** Fuzzing with Unicorn Mode ***
-
-To really use unicorn-mode effectively you need to prepare the following:
-
- * Relevant binary code to be fuzzed
- * Knowledge of the memory map and good starting state
- * Folder containing sample inputs to start fuzzing with
- - Same ideas as any other AFL inputs
- - Quality/speed of results will depend greatly on quality of starting
- samples
- - See AFL's guidance on how to create a sample corpus
- * Unicorn-based test harness which:
- - Adds memory map regions
- - Loads binary code into memory
- - Emulates at least one instruction*
- - Yeah, this is lame. See 'Gotchas' section below for more info
- - Loads and verifies data to fuzz from a command-line specified file
- - AFL will provide mutated inputs by changing the file passed to
- the test harness
- - Presumably the data to be fuzzed is at a fixed buffer address
- - If input constraints (size, invalid bytes, etc.) are known they
- should be checked after the file is loaded. If a constraint
- fails, just exit the test harness. AFL will treat the input as
- 'uninteresting' and move on.
- - Sets up registers and memory state for beginning of test
- - Emulates the interested code from beginning to end
- - If a crash is detected, the test harness must 'crash' by
- throwing a signal (SIGSEGV, SIGKILL, SIGABORT, etc.)
-
-Once you have all those things ready to go you just need to run afl-fuzz in
-'unicorn-mode' by passing in the '-U' flag:
-
- $ afl-fuzz -U -m none -i /path/to/inputs -o /path/to/results -- ./test_harness @@
-
-The normal afl-fuzz command line format applies to everything here. Refer to
-AFL's main documentation for more info about how to use afl-fuzz effectively.
-
-For a much clearer vision of what all of this looks like, please refer to the
-sample provided in the 'unicorn_mode/samples' directory. There is also a blog
-post that goes over the basics at:
-
-https://medium.com/@njvoss299/afl-unicorn-fuzzing-arbitrary-binary-code-563ca28936bf
-
-The 'helper_scripts' directory also contains several helper scripts that allow you
-to dump context from a running process, load it, and hook heap allocations. For details
-on how to use this check out the follow-up blog post to the one linked above.
-
-A example use of AFL-Unicorn mode is discussed in the Paper Unicorefuzz:
-https://www.usenix.org/conference/woot19/presentation/maier
-
-3) Gotchas, feedback, bugs
---------------------------
-
-To make sure that AFL's fork server starts up correctly the Unicorn test
-harness script must emulate at least one instruction before loading the
-data that will be fuzzed from the input file. It doesn't matter what the
-instruction is, nor if it is valid. This is an artifact of how the fork-server
-is started and could likely be fixed with some clever re-arranging of the
-patches applied to Unicorn.
-
-Running the build script builds Unicorn and its python bindings and installs
-them on your system. This installation will supersede any existing Unicorn
-installation with the patched afl-unicorn version.
-
-Refer to the unicorn_mode/samples/arm_example/arm_tester.c for an example
-of how to do this properly! If you don't get this right, AFL will not
-load any mutated inputs and your fuzzing will be useless!