AFL Quick Start Guide

You should read Instrumenting programs for AFL and Fuzzing with afl-fuzz. They’re pretty short. If you really can’t, here’s how to hit the ground running:

  1. Compile AFL with make. If build fails, see Installation instructions for tips.

  2. Find or write a reasonably fast and simple program that takes data from a file or stdin, processes it in a test-worthy way, then exits cleanly. If testing a network service, modify it to run in the foreground and read from stdin. When fuzzing a format that uses checksums, comment out the checksum verification code, too.

    The program must crash properly when a fault is encountered. Watch out for custom SIGSEGV or SIGABRT handlers and background processes. For tips on detecting non-crashing flaws, see Going beyond crashes.

  3. Compile the program / library to be fuzzed using afl-gcc. A common way to do this would be:

    CC=/path/to/afl-gcc CXX=/path/to/afl-g++ ./configure --disable-shared
    make clean all
    

    If program build fails, ping <afl-users@googlegroups.com>.

  4. Get a small but valid input file that makes sense to the program. When fuzzing verbose syntax (SQL, HTTP, etc), create a dictionary as described in dictionaries/README.dictionaries, too.

  5. If the program reads from stdin, run afl-fuzz like so:

    ./afl-fuzz -i testcase_dir -o findings_dir -- \
       /path/to/tested/program [...program's cmdline...]
    

    If the program takes input from a file, you can put @@ in the program’s command line; AFL will put an auto-generated file name in there for you.

  6. Investigate anything shown in red in the fuzzer UI by promptly consulting “Understanding the status screen”.

That’s it. Sit back, relax, and - time permitting - try to skim through the following: