This group contains an overview of the Nyx project. The Nyx project consists of its core component, a modified version of QEMU that allows to take and reset VM snapshots thousands of times per second, a modified version of KVM to enabled nested fuzzing and Intel-PT tracing during fuzzing, as well as some auxilary tools such as Spec-Fuzzer, a fuzzer specificially designed for fuzzing complex interactive targets. Spec-Fuzzer is capable of fuzzing anything that runs inside of KVM. This includes applications, kernels and even hypervisors - Nyx can be used to easily build fuzzers for almost anything.
Nyx framework consists in total of the following modules.
- libnyx - a library that you can readily use to run, snapshot and restore VMs to build your own fuzzers.
- packer - a tool that allows to bundle and pack targets into the type of VM we mostly use for ring-3 fuzzing.
- QEMU-Nyx - a modified version of QEMU that allows to take and restore snapshot, as well as communication via shared memory and hypercalls.
- KVM-Nyx - a modified version of KVM that enables Nyx's ability to use Intel-PT.
- libxdc - the fastest Intel-PT decoder in the west. Used to get coverage information from binary targets.
- Spec-Fuzzer - An example fuzzer that allows to fuzz targets with highly interactive inputs such as syscalls, hypercalls, API calls, GUI interations or -of course - network applications.
- AFL++ - Nyx integration has just landed in AFL++. It is implemented by using libnyx to enable fast snapshot-based fuzzing of arbitrary x86/x86-64 code running in QEMU-Nyx. It supports almost all features provided by Nyx (with the exception of REDQUEEN and some other more advanced features). If you want to fuzz userland targets, in-process file parsers, kernel interfaces or something else, you should definitely check it out.
- kAFL - Intel's actively mainted fork of kAFL, which now uses Nyx as its backend. kAFL is a fast coverage-guided fuzzer-frontend for Nyx written in Python3. It is great for anything that runs inside a QEMU/KVM VM — in particular x86 firmware, kernels and even full-blown operating systems. It supports all major Nyx features like Redqueen and Intel PT.
- LibAFL - A popular fuzzing library that supports various platforms, architectures, and fuzzing modes. Nyx mode is currently WIP (as part of an ongoing Google Summer of Code project).
You can find an incomplete documentation and some tutorials here.
In case you use one of Nyx`s components for your work, please consider to cite our papers:
@inproceedings{schumilo2017kafl,
author = {Schumilo, Sergej and Aschermann, Cornelius and Gawlik, Robert and Schinzel, Sebastian and Holz, Thorsten},
title = {{kAFL: Hardware-Assisted Feedback Fuzzing for OS Kernels}},
year = {2017},
booktitle = {USENIX Security Symposium}
}
@inproceedings{redqueen,
title={REDQUEEN: Fuzzing with Input-to-State Correspondence},
author={Aschermann, Cornelius and Schumilo, Sergej and Blazytko, Tim and Gawlik, Robert and Holz, Thorsten},
booktitle={Symposium on Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS)},
year={2019},
}
@inproceedings{nautilus,
title={{Nautilus: Fishing for Deep Bugs with Grammars}},
author={Aschermann, Cornelius and Frassetto, Tommaso and Holz, Thorsten and Jauernig, Patrick and Sadeghi, Ahmad-Reza and Teuchert, Daniel },
booktitle={Symposium on Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS)},
year={2019}
}
@inproceedings{blazytko2019grimoire,
author = {Tim Blazytko and Cornelius Aschermann and Moritz Schl{\"o}gel and Ali Abbasi and Sergej Schumilo and Simon W{\"o}rner and Thorsten Holz},
title = {{GRIMOIRE}: Synthesizing Structure while Fuzzing},,
year = {2019},
booktitle = {USENIX Security Symposium}
}
@inproceedings{ijon,
author = {Cornelius Aschermann and Sergej Schumilo and Ali Abbasi and Thorsten Holz},
title = {Ijon: Exploring Deep State Spaces via Fuzzing},
booktitle = {IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy},
year = {2020},
}
@inproceedings{hypercube,
title={{HYPER-CUBE: High-Dimensional Hypervisor Fuzzing}},
author={Schumilo, Sergej and Aschermann, Cornelius and Abbasi, Ali and W{\"o}rner, Simon and Holz, Thorsten},
booktitle=isoc-ndss,
year={2020}
}
@inproceedings {nyx,
author = {Sergej Schumilo and Cornelius Aschermann and Ali Abbasi and Simon W{\"o}r-ner and Thorsten Holz},
title = {Nyx: Greybox Hypervisor Fuzzing using Fast Snapshots and Affine Types},
booktitle = {30th {USENIX} Security Symposium ({USENIX} Security 21)},
year = {2021},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity21/presentation/schumilo},
}
@inproceedings{nyx-net,
author = {Schumilo, Sergej and Aschermann, Cornelius and Jemmett, Andrea and Abbasi, Ali and Holz, Thorsten},
title = {Nyx-Net: Network Fuzzing with Incremental Snapshots},
year = {2022},
isbn = {9781450391627},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3492321.3519591},
doi = {10.1145/3492321.3519591},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the Seventeenth European Conference on Computer Systems},
keywords = {testing, software security, fuzzing},
location = {Rennes, France},
series = {EuroSys '22}
}
