honggfuzz
Verified
3187 Stars
Security oriented software fuzzer. Supports evolutionary, feedback-driven fuzzing based on code coverage (SW and HW based)
Category
Malware-analysis
GitHub Stars
3187
Project Added On
Jun 02, 2025
Contributors
30
Table of Contents
Loading contents...
README.md
Honggfuzz
Description
A security oriented, feedback-driven, evolutionary, easy-to-use fuzzer with interesting analysis options. See the Usage document for a primer on Honggfuzz use.
Code
Installation
sudo apt-get install binutils-dev libunwind-dev libblocksruntime-dev clang
make
Features
- It’s multi-process and multi-threaded: there’s no need to run multiple copies of your fuzzer, as honggfuzz can unlock potential of all your available CPU cores with a single running instance. The file corpus is automatically shared and improved between all fuzzed processes.
- It’s blazingly fast when the persistent fuzzing mode is used. A simple/empty LLVMFuzzerTestOneInput function can be tested with up to 1mo iterations per second on a relatively modern CPU (e.g. i7-6700K).
- Has a solid track record of uncovered security bugs: the only (to the date) vulnerability in OpenSSL with the critical score mark was discovered by honggfuzz. See the Trophies paragraph for the summary of findings to the date.
- Uses low-level interfaces to monitor processes (e.g. ptrace under Linux and NetBSD). As opposed to other fuzzers, it will discover and report hijacked/ignored signals from crashes (intercepted and potentially hidden by a fuzzed program).
- Easy-to-use, feed it a simple corpus directory (can even be empty for the feedback-driven fuzzing), and it will work its way up, expanding it by utilizing feedback-based coverage metrics.
- Supports several (more than any other coverage-based feedback-driven fuzzer) hardware-based (CPU: branch/instruction counting, Intel BTS, Intel PT) and software-based feedback-driven fuzzing modes. Also, see the new qemu mode for blackbox binary fuzzing.
- Works (at least) under GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Mac OS X, Windows/CygWin and Android.
- Supports the persistent fuzzing mode (long-lived process calling a fuzzed API repeatedly). More on that can be found here.
- It comes with the examples directory, consisting of real world fuzz setups for widely-used software (e.g. Apache HTTPS, OpenSSL, libjpeg etc.).
- Provides a corpus minimization mode.
Requirements
- Linux - The BFD library (libbfd-dev) and libunwind (libunwind-dev/libunwind8-dev), clang-5.0 or higher for software-based coverage modes
- FreeBSD - gmake, clang-5.0 or newer
- NetBSD - gmake, clang, capstone, libBlocksRuntime
- Android - Android SDK/NDK. Also see this detailed doc on how to build and run it
- Windows - CygWin
- Darwin/OS X - Xcode 10.8+
- if Clang/LLVM is used to compile honggfuzz - link it with the BlocksRuntime Library (libblocksruntime-dev)
Trophies
Honggfuzz has been used to find a few interesting security problems in major software packages; An incomplete list:
- Dozens of security problems via the OSS-Fuzz project
- Pre-auth remote crash in OpenSSH
- Apache HTTPD
- Various SSL libs
- Remote OOB read in OpenSSL • CVE-2015-1789
- Remote Use-after-Free (potential RCE, rated as critical) in OpenSSL • CVE-2016-6309
- Remote OOB write in OpenSSL • CVE-2016-7054
- Remote OOB read in OpenSSL • CVE-2017-3731
- Uninitialized mem use in OpenSSL
- Crash in LibreSSL
- Invalid free in LibreSSL
- Uninitialized mem use in BoringSSL
- Adobe Flash memory corruption • CVE-2015-0316
- Multiple bugs in the libtiff library
- Multiple bugs in the librsvg library
- Multiple bugs in the poppler library
- Multiple exploitable bugs in IDA-Pro
- Remote DoS in Crypto++ • CVE-2016-9939
- Programming language interpreters
- Double-free in LibXMP
- Heap buffer overflow in SAPCAR • CVE-2017-8852
- Crashes in libbass
- FreeType 2:
- Stack corruption issues in the Windows OpenType parser: #1, #2, #3
- Infinite loop in NGINX Unit
- A couple of problems in the MATLAB MAT File I/O Library: #1, #2, #3, #4, #5
- NASM #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7, #8, #9, #10
- Samba tdbdump + tdbtool, #2, #3, #4, [#5](https://github.com/samba-team/samba/commit/b1
... Content truncated. Click "See More" to view the full README.
Tool Information
Author
Project Added On
June 02, 2025
License
Open Source
Tags
c
fuzzing
security