MODFuzz: A Multiobjective Directed Fuzzer for USB Drivers

USB interfaces have become ubiquitous in various Internet of Things (IoT) devices, all adhering to the same universal serial bus (USB) protocol. While enhancing convenience, they also widen the potential attack surface. Fuzzing is a proactive way to identify potential security threats for USB drivers. However, existing USB driver fuzzers primarily prioritize the code coverage of USB drivers, leading to a significant waste of computational resources on irrelevant code segments. To this end, we combine directed fuzzing and USB driver fuzzing for the first time, and present multiobjective directed fuzzer (MODFuzz), a pioneering multiobjective directed fuzzing method for USB drivers. MODFuzz autonomously locates the most vulnerable parts within USB drivers, concentrating fuzzing efforts on these areas. Diverging from the existing directed fuzzers, MODFuzz employs a dynamic direction instead of predetermined addresses to guide the fuzzing campaign toward the triggered execution traces with a greater probability of containing vulnerabilities. MODFuzz outperforms the strong baseline in terms of execution speed (about 14% improvement) and crash generation capabilities (about 69% improvement). Meanwhile, we found six previously unknown bugs (all confirmed and assigned vulnerability IDs) in Linux kernel v6.4.10 and received acknowledgment from Red Hat.

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Publication Details

Journal
IEEE Internet of Things Journal
Published
2025-02-28
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1109/jiot.2025.3546664
Primary Topic
Video Analysis and Summarization
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
0.00

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article

MODFuzz: A Multiobjective Directed Fuzzer for USB Drivers

Side Liu, Yilin Zhou, Jianming Fu, Guojun Peng et al.
IEEE Internet of Things Journal
Video Analysis and Summarization
article

MODFuzz: A Multiobjective Directed Fuzzer for USB Drivers

Side Liu, Yilin Zhou, Jianming Fu, Guojun Peng, Chenyang Wang, Zhen Li, Yanhao Wang, Xingliang Wang, Xiuzhang Yang
article en

Abstract

USB interfaces have become ubiquitous in various Internet of Things (IoT) devices, all adhering to the same universal serial bus (USB) protocol. While enhancing convenience, they also widen the potential attack surface. Fuzzing is a proactive way to identify potential security threats for USB drivers. However, existing USB driver fuzzers primarily prioritize the code coverage of USB drivers, leading to a significant waste of computational resources on irrelevant code segments. To this end, we combine directed fuzzing and USB driver fuzzing for the first time, and present multiobjective directed fuzzer (MODFuzz), a pioneering multiobjective directed fuzzing method for USB drivers. MODFuzz autonomously locates the most vulnerable parts within USB drivers, concentrating fuzzing efforts on these areas. Diverging from the existing directed fuzzers, MODFuzz employs a dynamic direction instead of predetermined addresses to guide the fuzzing campaign toward the triggered execution traces with a greater probability of containing vulnerabilities. MODFuzz outperforms the strong baseline in terms of execution speed (about 14% improvement) and crash generation capabilities (about 69% improvement). Meanwhile, we found six previously unknown bugs (all confirmed and assigned vulnerability IDs) in Linux kernel v6.4.10 and received acknowledgment from Red Hat.

IEEE Internet of Things JournalVol. 12(12)
Ministry of Public Security of the People's Republic of China (CN), Guizhou University (CN), Wuhan University (CN), Bloomington Health Foundation (US), Indiana University Bloomington (US), Guizhou Academy of Sciences (CN)
National Natural Science Foundation of China
Openalex Percentile: Top 98%
Video Analysis and Summarization
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