In the Magma chamber: Update and challenges in ground-truth vulnerabilities revival for automatic input generator comparison

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Riom, Timothée, Houy, Sabine, Kreyssig, Bruno, Bartel, Alexandre
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Riom, Timothée
Houy, Sabine
Kreyssig, Bruno
Bartel, Alexandre
author_facet Riom, Timothée
Houy, Sabine
Kreyssig, Bruno
Bartel, Alexandre
contents Fuzzing is a well-established technique for detecting bugs and vulnerabilities. With the surge of fuzzers and fuzzer platforms being developed such as AFL and OSSFuzz rises the necessity to benchmark these tools' performance. A common problem is that vulnerability benchmarks are based on bugs in old software releases. For this very reason, Magma introduced the notion of forward-porting to reintroduce vulnerable code in current software releases. While their results are promising, the state-of-the-art lacks an update on the maintainability of this approach over time. Indeed, adding the vulnerable code to a recent software version might either break its functionality or make the vulnerable code no longer reachable. We characterise the challenges with forward-porting by reassessing the portability of Magma's CVEs four years after its release and manually reintroducing the vulnerabilities in the current software versions. We find the straightforward process efficient for 17 of the 32 CVEs in our study. We further investigate why a trivial forward-porting process fails in the 15 other CVEs. This involves identifying the commits breaking the forward-porting process and reverting them in addition to the bug fix. While we manage to complete the process for nine of these CVEs, we provide an update on all 15 and explain the challenges we have been confronted with in this process. Thereby, we give the basis for future work towards a sustainable forward-ported fuzzing benchmark.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_19909
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle In the Magma chamber: Update and challenges in ground-truth vulnerabilities revival for automatic input generator comparison
Riom, Timothée
Houy, Sabine
Kreyssig, Bruno
Bartel, Alexandre
Software Engineering
Cryptography and Security
Fuzzing is a well-established technique for detecting bugs and vulnerabilities. With the surge of fuzzers and fuzzer platforms being developed such as AFL and OSSFuzz rises the necessity to benchmark these tools' performance. A common problem is that vulnerability benchmarks are based on bugs in old software releases. For this very reason, Magma introduced the notion of forward-porting to reintroduce vulnerable code in current software releases. While their results are promising, the state-of-the-art lacks an update on the maintainability of this approach over time. Indeed, adding the vulnerable code to a recent software version might either break its functionality or make the vulnerable code no longer reachable. We characterise the challenges with forward-porting by reassessing the portability of Magma's CVEs four years after its release and manually reintroducing the vulnerabilities in the current software versions. We find the straightforward process efficient for 17 of the 32 CVEs in our study. We further investigate why a trivial forward-porting process fails in the 15 other CVEs. This involves identifying the commits breaking the forward-porting process and reverting them in addition to the bug fix. While we manage to complete the process for nine of these CVEs, we provide an update on all 15 and explain the challenges we have been confronted with in this process. Thereby, we give the basis for future work towards a sustainable forward-ported fuzzing benchmark.
title In the Magma chamber: Update and challenges in ground-truth vulnerabilities revival for automatic input generator comparison
topic Software Engineering
Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.19909