| libtorrent

# fuzzing libtorrent

Author: | Arvid Norberg, arvid@libtorrent.org
Version: | 1.2.16

Table of contents

- overview

# overview

Libtorrent comes with a set of fuzzers. They are not included in the distribution tar ball, instead download the repository snapshot or clone the repository.

The fuzzers can be found in the fuzzers subdirectory and come with a Jamfile to build them, and a run.sh bash script to run them.

## building

The fuzzers use clang's libFuzzer, which means they can only be built with clang. Clang must be configured in your user-config.jam, for example:

    using clang : 7 : clang++-7 ;

When building, you most likely want to stage the resulting binaries into a well known location. Invoke b2 like this:

    b2 clang stage -j$(nproc)

This will build and stage all fuzzers into the fuzzers/fuzzers directory.

## corpus

Fuzzers work best if they have a relevant seed corpus of example inputs. You can either generate one using fuzzers/tools/generate_initial_corpus.py or download the corpus.zip from the github releases page.

To run the script to generate initial corpus, run it with fuzzers as the current working directory, like this:

    python tools/generate_initial_corpus.py

The corpus should be placed in the fuzzers directory, which should also be the current working directory when invoking the fuzzer binaries.

## running fuzzers

The run.sh script will run all fuzzers in parallel for 48 hours. It can easily be tweaked and mostly serve as an example of how to invoke them.

## large and small fuzzers

Since APIs can have different complexity, fuzz targets will also explore code of varying complexity. Some fuzzers cover a very small amount of code (e.g. parse_int) where other fuzz targets cover very large amount of code and can potentially go very deep into call stacks (e.g. torrent_info).

Small fuzz targets can fairly quickly exhaust all possible code paths and have quite limited utility after that, other than as regression tests. When putting a lot of CPU into long running fuzzing, it is better spent on large fuzz targets.

For this reason, there's another alias in the Jamfile to only build and stage large fuzz targets. Call b2 like this:

    b2 clang stage-large -j$(nproc)

## fast+slow

When building an initial corpus, it can be useful to quickly build a corpus with a large code coverage. To speed up this process, you can build the fuzzers without sanitizers, asserts and invariant checks. This won't find as many errors, but build a good corpus which can then be run against a fully instrumented fuzzer.

To build the fuzzers in this "fast" mode, there's a build variant build_coverage. Invoke b2 like this:

    b2 clang stage build_coverage -j$(nproc)

For more details on "fast + slow" see Paul Dreik's talk.

## sharing corpora

Before sharing your fuzz corpus, it should be minimized. There is a script called minimize.sh which moves corpus to prev-corpus and copies over a minimized set of inputs to a new corpus directory.