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Triereme

We introduce Triereme, a method to speed up concolic engines in hybrid fuzzers by reducing the time spent in the SMT solver. Triereme schedules and caches solver queries using a trie (or prefix tree) data structure, thereby making it easier to exploit common prefixes. This design is made possible by decoupling concolic tracing from concolic solving, running both in separate processes. As a result, Triereme manages to reconcile pruning through path constraint filtering with incremental solving, allowing it to reap their combined benefits.

Our prototype borrows the instrumentation from SymCC and relies on LibAFL for its fuzzing helper. The implementation is heavily inspired by QSYM.

A thorough description of this work can be found in "Triereme: Speeding up hybrid fuzzing through efficient query scheduling", conditionally accepted at ACSAC 2023.

The FuzzBench fork used for our evaluation can be found here.

Building Triereme

Detailed building instructions for Ubuntu 20.04 can be found in the Dockerfile within the FuzzBench fork used for our evaluation.

This file includes information regarding the dependecies required, how to build AFL++, and how to build libcxx and libcxx-abi for C++ support.

Running Triereme

Build Target Program

The target program needs to be built twice: once with the AFL++ instrumentation and one with the SymCC instrumentation. The AFL++ binary can be customized independently with a variety of options that are described in the original documentation; we recommend using at least CmpLog and non-colliding coverage. Detailed instructions on the appropriate flags and environment variables that need to be used to build the program can be found in the build scripts contained in the FuzzBench fork that was used for our evaluation.

Fuzzing

Once the two instrumented versions of the target program have been built, AFL++ and the concolic engine have to be started separately. Precise instructions on how to start both components can be found in the corresponding script in our FuzzBench fork. As before, the options used for AFL++ can be freely customized following the original documentation.