xref: /openbmc/qemu/docs/devel/fuzzing.rst (revision ce799a04)
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
22To build the fuzzers, install a recent version of clang:
23Configure with (substitute the clang binaries with the version you installed).
24Here, enable-sanitizers, is optional but it allows us to reliably detect bugs
25such as out-of-bounds accesses, use-after-frees, double-frees etc.::
26
27    CC=clang-8 CXX=clang++-8 /path/to/configure --enable-fuzzing \
28                                                --enable-sanitizers
29
30Fuzz targets are built similarly to system targets::
31
32    make qemu-fuzz-i386
33
34This builds ``./qemu-fuzz-i386``
35
36The first option to this command is: ``--fuzz-target=FUZZ_NAME``
37To list all of the available fuzzers run ``qemu-fuzz-i386`` with no arguments.
38
39For example::
40
41    ./qemu-fuzz-i386 --fuzz-target=virtio-scsi-fuzz
42
43Internally, libfuzzer parses all arguments that do not begin with ``"--"``.
44Information about these is available by passing ``-help=1``
45
46Now the only thing left to do is wait for the fuzzer to trigger potential
47crashes.
48
49Useful libFuzzer flags
50----------------------
51
52As mentioned above, libFuzzer accepts some arguments. Passing ``-help=1`` will
53list the available arguments. In particular, these arguments might be helpful:
54
55* ``CORPUS_DIR/`` : Specify a directory as the last argument to libFuzzer.
56  libFuzzer stores each "interesting" input in this corpus directory. The next
57  time you run libFuzzer, it will read all of the inputs from the corpus, and
58  continue fuzzing from there. You can also specify multiple directories.
59  libFuzzer loads existing inputs from all specified directories, but will only
60  write new ones to the first one specified.
61
62* ``-max_len=4096`` : specify the maximum byte-length of the inputs libFuzzer
63  will generate.
64
65* ``-close_fd_mask={1,2,3}`` : close, stderr, or both. Useful for targets that
66  trigger many debug/error messages, or create output on the serial console.
67
68* ``-jobs=4 -workers=4`` : These arguments configure libFuzzer to run 4 fuzzers in
69  parallel (4 fuzzing jobs in 4 worker processes). Alternatively, with only
70  ``-jobs=N``, libFuzzer automatically spawns a number of workers less than or equal
71  to half the available CPU cores. Replace 4 with a number appropriate for your
72  machine. Make sure to specify a ``CORPUS_DIR``, which will allow the parallel
73  fuzzers to share information about the interesting inputs they find.
74
75* ``-use_value_profile=1`` : For each comparison operation, libFuzzer computes
76  ``(caller_pc&4095) | (popcnt(Arg1 ^ Arg2) << 12)`` and places this in the
77  coverage table. Useful for targets with "magic" constants. If Arg1 came from
78  the fuzzer's input and Arg2 is a magic constant, then each time the Hamming
79  distance between Arg1 and Arg2 decreases, libFuzzer adds the input to the
80  corpus.
81
82* ``-shrink=1`` : Tries to make elements of the corpus "smaller". Might lead to
83  better coverage performance, depending on the target.
84
85Note that libFuzzer's exact behavior will depend on the version of
86clang and libFuzzer used to build the device fuzzers.
87
88Generating Coverage Reports
89---------------------------
90
91Code coverage is a crucial metric for evaluating a fuzzer's performance.
92libFuzzer's output provides a "cov: " column that provides a total number of
93unique blocks/edges covered. To examine coverage on a line-by-line basis we
94can use Clang coverage:
95
96 1. Configure libFuzzer to store a corpus of all interesting inputs (see
97    CORPUS_DIR above)
98 2. ``./configure`` the QEMU build with ::
99
100    --enable-fuzzing \
101    --extra-cflags="-fprofile-instr-generate -fcoverage-mapping"
102
103 3. Re-run the fuzzer. Specify $CORPUS_DIR/* as an argument, telling libfuzzer
104    to execute all of the inputs in $CORPUS_DIR and exit. Once the process
105    exits, you should find a file, "default.profraw" in the working directory.
106 4. Execute these commands to generate a detailed HTML coverage-report::
107
108      llvm-profdata merge -output=default.profdata default.profraw
109      llvm-cov show ./path/to/qemu-fuzz-i386 -instr-profile=default.profdata \
110      --format html -output-dir=/path/to/output/report
111
112Adding a new fuzzer
113-------------------
114
115Coverage over virtual devices can be improved by adding additional fuzzers.
116Fuzzers are kept in ``tests/qtest/fuzz/`` and should be added to
117``tests/qtest/fuzz/meson.build``
118
119Fuzzers can rely on both qtest and libqos to communicate with virtual devices.
120
1211. Create a new source file. For example ``tests/qtest/fuzz/foo-device-fuzz.c``.
122
1232. Write the fuzzing code using the libqtest/libqos API. See existing fuzzers
124   for reference.
125
1263. Add the fuzzer to ``tests/qtest/fuzz/meson.build``.
127
128Fuzzers can be more-or-less thought of as special qtest programs which can
129modify the qtest commands and/or qtest command arguments based on inputs
130provided by libfuzzer. Libfuzzer passes a byte array and length. Commonly the
131fuzzer loops over the byte-array interpreting it as a list of qtest commands,
132addresses, or values.
133
134The Generic Fuzzer
135------------------
136
137Writing a fuzz target can be a lot of effort (especially if a device driver has
138not be built-out within libqos). Many devices can be fuzzed to some degree,
139without any device-specific code, using the generic-fuzz target.
140
141The generic-fuzz target is capable of fuzzing devices over their PIO, MMIO,
142and DMA input-spaces. To apply the generic-fuzz to a device, we need to define
143two env-variables, at minimum:
144
145* ``QEMU_FUZZ_ARGS=`` is the set of QEMU arguments used to configure a machine, with
146  the device attached. For example, if we want to fuzz the virtio-net device
147  attached to a pc-i440fx machine, we can specify::
148
149    QEMU_FUZZ_ARGS="-M pc -nodefaults -netdev user,id=user0 \
150    -device virtio-net,netdev=user0"
151
152* ``QEMU_FUZZ_OBJECTS=`` is a set of space-delimited strings used to identify
153  the MemoryRegions that will be fuzzed. These strings are compared against
154  MemoryRegion names and MemoryRegion owner names, to decide whether each
155  MemoryRegion should be fuzzed. These strings support globbing. For the
156  virtio-net example, we could use one of ::
157
158    QEMU_FUZZ_OBJECTS='virtio-net'
159    QEMU_FUZZ_OBJECTS='virtio*'
160    QEMU_FUZZ_OBJECTS='virtio* pcspk' # Fuzz the virtio devices and the speaker
161    QEMU_FUZZ_OBJECTS='*' # Fuzz the whole machine``
162
163The ``"info mtree"`` and ``"info qom-tree"`` monitor commands can be especially
164useful for identifying the ``MemoryRegion`` and ``Object`` names used for
165matching.
166
167As a generic rule-of-thumb, the more ``MemoryRegions``/Devices we match, the
168greater the input-space, and the smaller the probability of finding crashing
169inputs for individual devices. As such, it is usually a good idea to limit the
170fuzzer to only a few ``MemoryRegions``.
171
172To ensure that these env variables have been configured correctly, we can use::
173
174    ./qemu-fuzz-i386 --fuzz-target=generic-fuzz -runs=0
175
176The output should contain a complete list of matched MemoryRegions.
177
178OSS-Fuzz
179--------
180QEMU is continuously fuzzed on `OSS-Fuzz
181<https://github.com/google/oss-fuzz>`_.  By default, the OSS-Fuzz build
182will try to fuzz every fuzz-target. Since the generic-fuzz target
183requires additional information provided in environment variables, we
184pre-define some generic-fuzz configs in
185``tests/qtest/fuzz/generic_fuzz_configs.h``. Each config must specify:
186
187- ``.name``: To identify the fuzzer config
188
189- ``.args`` OR ``.argfunc``: A string or pointer to a function returning a
190  string.  These strings are used to specify the ``QEMU_FUZZ_ARGS``
191  environment variable.  ``argfunc`` is useful when the config relies on e.g.
192  a dynamically created temp directory, or a free tcp/udp port.
193
194- ``.objects``: A string that specifies the ``QEMU_FUZZ_OBJECTS`` environment
195  variable.
196
197To fuzz additional devices/device configuration on OSS-Fuzz, send patches for
198either a new device-specific fuzzer or a new generic-fuzz config.
199
200Build details:
201
202- The Dockerfile that sets up the environment for building QEMU's
203  fuzzers on OSS-Fuzz can be fund in the OSS-Fuzz repository
204  __(https://github.com/google/oss-fuzz/blob/master/projects/qemu/Dockerfile)
205
206- The script responsible for building the fuzzers can be found in the
207  QEMU source tree at ``scripts/oss-fuzz/build.sh``
208
209Building Crash Reproducers
210-----------------------------------------
211When we find a crash, we should try to create an independent reproducer, that
212can be used on a non-fuzzer build of QEMU. This filters out any potential
213false-positives, and improves the debugging experience for developers.
214Here are the steps for building a reproducer for a crash found by the
215generic-fuzz target.
216
217- Ensure the crash reproduces::
218
219    qemu-fuzz-i386 --fuzz-target... ./crash-...
220
221- Gather the QTest output for the crash::
222
223    QEMU_FUZZ_TIMEOUT=0 QTEST_LOG=1 FUZZ_SERIALIZE_QTEST=1 \
224    qemu-fuzz-i386 --fuzz-target... ./crash-... &> /tmp/trace
225
226- Reorder and clean-up the resulting trace::
227
228    scripts/oss-fuzz/reorder_fuzzer_qtest_trace.py /tmp/trace > /tmp/reproducer
229
230- Get the arguments needed to start qemu, and provide a path to qemu::
231
232    less /tmp/trace # The args should be logged at the top of this file
233    export QEMU_ARGS="-machine ..."
234    export QEMU_PATH="path/to/qemu-system"
235
236- Ensure the crash reproduces in qemu-system::
237
238    $QEMU_PATH $QEMU_ARGS -qtest stdio < /tmp/reproducer
239
240- From the crash output, obtain some string that identifies the crash. This
241  can be a line in the stack-trace, for example::
242
243    export CRASH_TOKEN="hw/usb/hcd-xhci.c:1865"
244
245- Minimize the reproducer::
246
247    scripts/oss-fuzz/minimize_qtest_trace.py -M1 -M2 \
248      /tmp/reproducer /tmp/reproducer-minimized
249
250- Confirm that the minimized reproducer still crashes::
251
252    $QEMU_PATH $QEMU_ARGS -qtest stdio < /tmp/reproducer-minimized
253
254- Create a one-liner reproducer that can be sent over email::
255
256    ./scripts/oss-fuzz/output_reproducer.py -bash /tmp/reproducer-minimized
257
258- Output the C source code for a test case that will reproduce the bug::
259
260    ./scripts/oss-fuzz/output_reproducer.py -owner "John Smith <john@smith.com>"\
261      -name "test_function_name" /tmp/reproducer-minimized
262
263- Report the bug and send a patch with the C reproducer upstream
264
265Implementation Details / Fuzzer Lifecycle
266-----------------------------------------
267
268The fuzzer has two entrypoints that libfuzzer calls. libfuzzer provides it's
269own ``main()``, which performs some setup, and calls the entrypoints:
270
271``LLVMFuzzerInitialize``: called prior to fuzzing. Used to initialize all of the
272necessary state
273
274``LLVMFuzzerTestOneInput``: called for each fuzzing run. Processes the input and
275resets the state at the end of each run.
276
277In more detail:
278
279``LLVMFuzzerInitialize`` parses the arguments to the fuzzer (must start with two
280dashes, so they are ignored by libfuzzer ``main()``). Currently, the arguments
281select the fuzz target. Then, the qtest client is initialized. If the target
282requires qos, qgraph is set up and the QOM/LIBQOS modules are initialized.
283Then the QGraph is walked and the QEMU cmd_line is determined and saved.
284
285After this, the ``vl.c:main`` is called to set up the guest. There are
286target-specific hooks that can be called before and after main, for
287additional setup(e.g. PCI setup, or VM snapshotting).
288
289``LLVMFuzzerTestOneInput``: Uses qtest/qos functions to act based on the fuzz
290input. It is also responsible for manually calling ``main_loop_wait`` to ensure
291that bottom halves are executed and any cleanup required before the next input.
292
293Since the same process is reused for many fuzzing runs, QEMU state needs to
294be reset at the end of each run. For example, this can be done by rebooting the
295VM, after each run.
296
297  - *Pros*: Straightforward and fast for simple fuzz targets.
298
299  - *Cons*: Depending on the device, does not reset all device state. If the
300    device requires some initialization prior to being ready for fuzzing (common
301    for QOS-based targets), this initialization needs to be done after each
302    reboot.
303
304  - *Example target*: ``i440fx-qtest-reboot-fuzz``
305