xref: /openbmc/qemu/docs/devel/fuzzing.rst (revision b91a0fa7)
1========
2Fuzzing
3========
4
5This document describes the virtual-device fuzzing infrastructure in QEMU and
6how to use it to implement additional fuzzers.
7
8Basics
9------
10
11Fuzzing operates by passing inputs to an entry point/target function. The
12fuzzer tracks the code coverage triggered by the input. Based on these
13findings, the fuzzer mutates the input and repeats the fuzzing.
14
15To fuzz QEMU, we rely on libfuzzer. Unlike other fuzzers such as AFL, libfuzzer
16is an *in-process* fuzzer. For the developer, this means that it is their
17responsibility to ensure that state is reset between fuzzing-runs.
18
19Building the fuzzers
20--------------------
21
22*NOTE*: If possible, build a 32-bit binary. When forking, the 32-bit fuzzer is
23much faster, since the page-map has a smaller size. This is due to the fact that
24AddressSanitizer maps ~20TB of memory, as part of its detection. This results
25in a large page-map, and a much slower ``fork()``.
26
27To build the fuzzers, install a recent version of clang:
28Configure with (substitute the clang binaries with the version you installed).
29Here, enable-sanitizers, is optional but it allows us to reliably detect bugs
30such as out-of-bounds accesses, use-after-frees, double-frees etc.::
31
32    CC=clang-8 CXX=clang++-8 /path/to/configure --enable-fuzzing \
33                                                --enable-sanitizers
34
35Fuzz targets are built similarly to system targets::
36
37    make qemu-fuzz-i386
38
39This builds ``./qemu-fuzz-i386``
40
41The first option to this command is: ``--fuzz-target=FUZZ_NAME``
42To list all of the available fuzzers run ``qemu-fuzz-i386`` with no arguments.
43
44For example::
45
46    ./qemu-fuzz-i386 --fuzz-target=virtio-scsi-fuzz
47
48Internally, libfuzzer parses all arguments that do not begin with ``"--"``.
49Information about these is available by passing ``-help=1``
50
51Now the only thing left to do is wait for the fuzzer to trigger potential
52crashes.
53
54Useful libFuzzer flags
55----------------------
56
57As mentioned above, libFuzzer accepts some arguments. Passing ``-help=1`` will
58list the available arguments. In particular, these arguments might be helpful:
59
60* ``CORPUS_DIR/`` : Specify a directory as the last argument to libFuzzer.
61  libFuzzer stores each "interesting" input in this corpus directory. The next
62  time you run libFuzzer, it will read all of the inputs from the corpus, and
63  continue fuzzing from there. You can also specify multiple directories.
64  libFuzzer loads existing inputs from all specified directories, but will only
65  write new ones to the first one specified.
66
67* ``-max_len=4096`` : specify the maximum byte-length of the inputs libFuzzer
68  will generate.
69
70* ``-close_fd_mask={1,2,3}`` : close, stderr, or both. Useful for targets that
71  trigger many debug/error messages, or create output on the serial console.
72
73* ``-jobs=4 -workers=4`` : These arguments configure libFuzzer to run 4 fuzzers in
74  parallel (4 fuzzing jobs in 4 worker processes). Alternatively, with only
75  ``-jobs=N``, libFuzzer automatically spawns a number of workers less than or equal
76  to half the available CPU cores. Replace 4 with a number appropriate for your
77  machine. Make sure to specify a ``CORPUS_DIR``, which will allow the parallel
78  fuzzers to share information about the interesting inputs they find.
79
80* ``-use_value_profile=1`` : For each comparison operation, libFuzzer computes
81  ``(caller_pc&4095) | (popcnt(Arg1 ^ Arg2) << 12)`` and places this in the
82  coverage table. Useful for targets with "magic" constants. If Arg1 came from
83  the fuzzer's input and Arg2 is a magic constant, then each time the Hamming
84  distance between Arg1 and Arg2 decreases, libFuzzer adds the input to the
85  corpus.
86
87* ``-shrink=1`` : Tries to make elements of the corpus "smaller". Might lead to
88  better coverage performance, depending on the target.
89
90Note that libFuzzer's exact behavior will depend on the version of
91clang and libFuzzer used to build the device fuzzers.
92
93Generating Coverage Reports
94---------------------------
95
96Code coverage is a crucial metric for evaluating a fuzzer's performance.
97libFuzzer's output provides a "cov: " column that provides a total number of
98unique blocks/edges covered. To examine coverage on a line-by-line basis we
99can use Clang coverage:
100
101 1. Configure libFuzzer to store a corpus of all interesting inputs (see
102    CORPUS_DIR above)
103 2. ``./configure`` the QEMU build with ::
104
105    --enable-fuzzing \
106    --extra-cflags="-fprofile-instr-generate -fcoverage-mapping"
107
108 3. Re-run the fuzzer. Specify $CORPUS_DIR/* as an argument, telling libfuzzer
109    to execute all of the inputs in $CORPUS_DIR and exit. Once the process
110    exits, you should find a file, "default.profraw" in the working directory.
111 4. Execute these commands to generate a detailed HTML coverage-report::
112
113      llvm-profdata merge -output=default.profdata default.profraw
114      llvm-cov show ./path/to/qemu-fuzz-i386 -instr-profile=default.profdata \
115      --format html -output-dir=/path/to/output/report
116
117Adding a new fuzzer
118-------------------
119
120Coverage over virtual devices can be improved by adding additional fuzzers.
121Fuzzers are kept in ``tests/qtest/fuzz/`` and should be added to
122``tests/qtest/fuzz/meson.build``
123
124Fuzzers can rely on both qtest and libqos to communicate with virtual devices.
125
1261. Create a new source file. For example ``tests/qtest/fuzz/foo-device-fuzz.c``.
127
1282. Write the fuzzing code using the libqtest/libqos API. See existing fuzzers
129   for reference.
130
1313. Add the fuzzer to ``tests/qtest/fuzz/meson.build``.
132
133Fuzzers can be more-or-less thought of as special qtest programs which can
134modify the qtest commands and/or qtest command arguments based on inputs
135provided by libfuzzer. Libfuzzer passes a byte array and length. Commonly the
136fuzzer loops over the byte-array interpreting it as a list of qtest commands,
137addresses, or values.
138
139The Generic Fuzzer
140------------------
141
142Writing a fuzz target can be a lot of effort (especially if a device driver has
143not be built-out within libqos). Many devices can be fuzzed to some degree,
144without any device-specific code, using the generic-fuzz target.
145
146The generic-fuzz target is capable of fuzzing devices over their PIO, MMIO,
147and DMA input-spaces. To apply the generic-fuzz to a device, we need to define
148two env-variables, at minimum:
149
150* ``QEMU_FUZZ_ARGS=`` is the set of QEMU arguments used to configure a machine, with
151  the device attached. For example, if we want to fuzz the virtio-net device
152  attached to a pc-i440fx machine, we can specify::
153
154    QEMU_FUZZ_ARGS="-M pc -nodefaults -netdev user,id=user0 \
155    -device virtio-net,netdev=user0"
156
157* ``QEMU_FUZZ_OBJECTS=`` is a set of space-delimited strings used to identify
158  the MemoryRegions that will be fuzzed. These strings are compared against
159  MemoryRegion names and MemoryRegion owner names, to decide whether each
160  MemoryRegion should be fuzzed. These strings support globbing. For the
161  virtio-net example, we could use one of ::
162
163    QEMU_FUZZ_OBJECTS='virtio-net'
164    QEMU_FUZZ_OBJECTS='virtio*'
165    QEMU_FUZZ_OBJECTS='virtio* pcspk' # Fuzz the virtio devices and the speaker
166    QEMU_FUZZ_OBJECTS='*' # Fuzz the whole machine``
167
168The ``"info mtree"`` and ``"info qom-tree"`` monitor commands can be especially
169useful for identifying the ``MemoryRegion`` and ``Object`` names used for
170matching.
171
172As a generic rule-of-thumb, the more ``MemoryRegions``/Devices we match, the
173greater the input-space, and the smaller the probability of finding crashing
174inputs for individual devices. As such, it is usually a good idea to limit the
175fuzzer to only a few ``MemoryRegions``.
176
177To ensure that these env variables have been configured correctly, we can use::
178
179    ./qemu-fuzz-i386 --fuzz-target=generic-fuzz -runs=0
180
181The output should contain a complete list of matched MemoryRegions.
182
183OSS-Fuzz
184--------
185QEMU is continuously fuzzed on `OSS-Fuzz
186<https://github.com/google/oss-fuzz>`_.  By default, the OSS-Fuzz build
187will try to fuzz every fuzz-target. Since the generic-fuzz target
188requires additional information provided in environment variables, we
189pre-define some generic-fuzz configs in
190``tests/qtest/fuzz/generic_fuzz_configs.h``. Each config must specify:
191
192- ``.name``: To identify the fuzzer config
193
194- ``.args`` OR ``.argfunc``: A string or pointer to a function returning a
195  string.  These strings are used to specify the ``QEMU_FUZZ_ARGS``
196  environment variable.  ``argfunc`` is useful when the config relies on e.g.
197  a dynamically created temp directory, or a free tcp/udp port.
198
199- ``.objects``: A string that specifies the ``QEMU_FUZZ_OBJECTS`` environment
200  variable.
201
202To fuzz additional devices/device configuration on OSS-Fuzz, send patches for
203either a new device-specific fuzzer or a new generic-fuzz config.
204
205Build details:
206
207- The Dockerfile that sets up the environment for building QEMU's
208  fuzzers on OSS-Fuzz can be fund in the OSS-Fuzz repository
209  __(https://github.com/google/oss-fuzz/blob/master/projects/qemu/Dockerfile)
210
211- The script responsible for building the fuzzers can be found in the
212  QEMU source tree at ``scripts/oss-fuzz/build.sh``
213
214Building Crash Reproducers
215-----------------------------------------
216When we find a crash, we should try to create an independent reproducer, that
217can be used on a non-fuzzer build of QEMU. This filters out any potential
218false-positives, and improves the debugging experience for developers.
219Here are the steps for building a reproducer for a crash found by the
220generic-fuzz target.
221
222- Ensure the crash reproduces::
223
224    qemu-fuzz-i386 --fuzz-target... ./crash-...
225
226- Gather the QTest output for the crash::
227
228    QEMU_FUZZ_TIMEOUT=0 QTEST_LOG=1 FUZZ_SERIALIZE_QTEST=1 \
229    qemu-fuzz-i386 --fuzz-target... ./crash-... &> /tmp/trace
230
231- Reorder and clean-up the resulting trace::
232
233    scripts/oss-fuzz/reorder_fuzzer_qtest_trace.py /tmp/trace > /tmp/reproducer
234
235- Get the arguments needed to start qemu, and provide a path to qemu::
236
237    less /tmp/trace # The args should be logged at the top of this file
238    export QEMU_ARGS="-machine ..."
239    export QEMU_PATH="path/to/qemu-system"
240
241- Ensure the crash reproduces in qemu-system::
242
243    $QEMU_PATH $QEMU_ARGS -qtest stdio < /tmp/reproducer
244
245- From the crash output, obtain some string that identifies the crash. This
246  can be a line in the stack-trace, for example::
247
248    export CRASH_TOKEN="hw/usb/hcd-xhci.c:1865"
249
250- Minimize the reproducer::
251
252    scripts/oss-fuzz/minimize_qtest_trace.py -M1 -M2 \
253      /tmp/reproducer /tmp/reproducer-minimized
254
255- Confirm that the minimized reproducer still crashes::
256
257    $QEMU_PATH $QEMU_ARGS -qtest stdio < /tmp/reproducer-minimized
258
259- Create a one-liner reproducer that can be sent over email::
260
261    ./scripts/oss-fuzz/output_reproducer.py -bash /tmp/reproducer-minimized
262
263- Output the C source code for a test case that will reproduce the bug::
264
265    ./scripts/oss-fuzz/output_reproducer.py -owner "John Smith <john@smith.com>"\
266      -name "test_function_name" /tmp/reproducer-minimized
267
268- Report the bug and send a patch with the C reproducer upstream
269
270Implementation Details / Fuzzer Lifecycle
271-----------------------------------------
272
273The fuzzer has two entrypoints that libfuzzer calls. libfuzzer provides it's
274own ``main()``, which performs some setup, and calls the entrypoints:
275
276``LLVMFuzzerInitialize``: called prior to fuzzing. Used to initialize all of the
277necessary state
278
279``LLVMFuzzerTestOneInput``: called for each fuzzing run. Processes the input and
280resets the state at the end of each run.
281
282In more detail:
283
284``LLVMFuzzerInitialize`` parses the arguments to the fuzzer (must start with two
285dashes, so they are ignored by libfuzzer ``main()``). Currently, the arguments
286select the fuzz target. Then, the qtest client is initialized. If the target
287requires qos, qgraph is set up and the QOM/LIBQOS modules are initialized.
288Then the QGraph is walked and the QEMU cmd_line is determined and saved.
289
290After this, the ``vl.c:qemu_main`` is called to set up the guest. There are
291target-specific hooks that can be called before and after qemu_main, for
292additional setup(e.g. PCI setup, or VM snapshotting).
293
294``LLVMFuzzerTestOneInput``: Uses qtest/qos functions to act based on the fuzz
295input. It is also responsible for manually calling ``main_loop_wait`` to ensure
296that bottom halves are executed and any cleanup required before the next input.
297
298Since the same process is reused for many fuzzing runs, QEMU state needs to
299be reset at the end of each run. There are currently two implemented
300options for resetting state:
301
302- Reboot the guest between runs.
303  - *Pros*: Straightforward and fast for simple fuzz targets.
304
305  - *Cons*: Depending on the device, does not reset all device state. If the
306    device requires some initialization prior to being ready for fuzzing (common
307    for QOS-based targets), this initialization needs to be done after each
308    reboot.
309
310  - *Example target*: ``i440fx-qtest-reboot-fuzz``
311
312- Run each test case in a separate forked process and copy the coverage
313   information back to the parent. This is fairly similar to AFL's "deferred"
314   fork-server mode [3]
315
316  - *Pros*: Relatively fast. Devices only need to be initialized once. No need to
317    do slow reboots or vmloads.
318
319  - *Cons*: Not officially supported by libfuzzer. Does not work well for
320     devices that rely on dedicated threads.
321
322  - *Example target*: ``virtio-net-fork-fuzz``
323