Coverage-guided fuzzing has become mainstream in fuzzing to automatically expose program vulnerabilities. Recently, a group of fuzzers are proposed to adopt a random search mechanism namely Havoc, explicitly or implicitly, to augment their edge exploration. However, they only tend to adopt the default setup of Havoc as an implementation option while none of them attempts to explore its power under diverse setups or inspect its rationale for potential improvement. In this paper, to address such issues, we conduct the first empirical study on Havoc to enhance the understanding of its characteristics. Specifically, we first find that applying the default setup of Havoc to fuzzers can significantly improve their edge coverage performance. Interestingly, we further observe that even simply executing Havoc itself without appending it to any fuzzer can lead to strong edge coverage performance and outperform most of our studied fuzzers. Moreover, we also extend the execution time of Havoc and find that most fuzzers can not only achieve significantly higher edge coverage, but also tend to perform similarly (i.e., their performance gaps get largely bridged). Inspired by the findings, we further propose HavocMAB, which models the Havoc mutation strategy as a multi-armed bandit problem to be solved by dynamically adjusting the mutation strategy. The evaluation result presents that HavocMAB can significantly increase the edge coverage by 11.1% on average for all the benchmark projects compared with Havoc and even slightly outperform state-of-the-art QSYM which augments its computing resource by adopting three parallel threads. We further execute HavocMAB with three parallel threads and result in 9% higher average edge coverage over QSYM upon all the benchmark projects.

@inproceedings{WuJXHCZZ22,
  title = {One fuzzing strategy to rule them all},
  author = {Mingyuan Wu and Ling Jiang and Jiahong Xiang and Yanwei Huang and Heming Cui and Lingming Zhang and Yuqun Zhang},
  booktitle = {ICSE},
  year = {2022},
  doi = {10.1145/3510003.3510174}
}