SANS Introduces “Fuzzing for Bug Discovery”

A few minutes ago I submitted what is hopefully the last set of edits for a new day of training material I wrote titled “Fuzzing for Bug Discovery”. This hands-on day of material joins Steve Sims’ Developing Exploits for Penetration Testers and Security Researchers course.

If you haven’t already checked out Steve’s course, I highly recommend it. In just a few days, he has been turning students into exploit developers, using hands-on labs to reinforce focused training materials. The new day of fuzzing material also gives students training on the tools and techniques for software fault testing using canned and custom fuzzing tools. A quick sampling of topics includes:

  • Why fuzzing is needed for security, and how it can be used by Quality Assurance teams, software developers, vendors and penetration testers
  • Building your attack plan, sources for data collection, testing and monitoring techniques and tools
  • Fuzzing techniques including static test case development, randomized fuzzing, mutation and intelligent mutation fuzzing
  • Fuzzing opportunities and common software developer mistakes to target
  • Effective fuzzing through code coverage analysis using available source or closed binaries
  • In-depth coverage on building custom fuzzers with Sulley

If I had to pick, I’d say the best part of the new day are the lab exercises. In the labs, you’ll use a variety of tools including Taof, Gcov/Lcov, Paimei with Pstalker, IDA Pro with the idapython plugin, the Sulley fuzzing framework and a bunch more. In the labs, you’ll definitely find interesting and useful bugs that, at the end of Steve’s course, you’ll be writing exploits for.

Steve is teaching his Developing Exploits for Penetration Testers and Security Researchers course in several upcoming conferences:

As always, I’m more than happy to any answer questions about this day of material. I’ll also try to answer questions about the entire course, though I may defer you to Steve. In the meantime, check out the description and sample topics. Also, my thanks to Steve for the chance to contribute to his awesome course.

-Josh