FIRM-COV: High-Coverage Greybox Fuzzing for IoT Firmware via Optimized Process Emulation

• Main Authors: Juhwan Kim, Jihyeon Yu, Hyunwook Kim, Fayozbek Rustamov, Joobeom Yun
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 2021-01-01
• Series: IEEE Access
• Subjects: Dictionary; emulation; firmware; fuzzing; IoT; vulnerability
• Online Access: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9489311/

With the growing prevalence of the Internet of Things (IoT), related security threats have kept pace. The need to dynamically detect vulnerabilities in IoT devices cannot be overstated. In this work, we present FIRM-COV, the first high coverage-oriented greybox fuzzer for IoT firmware. FIRM-COV leverages newly optimized process emulation by targeting IoT programs and mining real-world vulnerabilities. FIRM-COV focuses on solving problems of IoT fuzzing based on empirical analyses, using the required structured input, the inaccuracy and instability of emulation, and the required high code coverage. By optimizing the existing emulation technique, FIRM-COV always maintains a stable state and achieves high accuracy when detecting vulnerabilities. We also implement a dictionary generation algorithm to provide structured input values and synergy scheduling to achieve high coverage and throughput. We compare FIRM-COV with other IoT fuzzing frameworks for eight real-world IoT devices. As a result, FIRM-COV achieves the highest coverage and throughput, finding the fastest and most 1-day vulnerabilities with almost no false-positives. It also found two 0-day vulnerabilities in real-world IoT devices within 24 h.