Six years ago, NCC Group researchers Tim Newsham and Jesse Hertz released TriforceAFL – an extension of the American Fuzzy Lop (AFL) fuzzer which supports full-system fuzzing using QEMU – but unfortunately the associated whitepaper for this work was never published. Today, we’re releasing it for the curious reader and historical archives alike. While fuzzing has come a long way since 2016/2017, we hope that this paper will provide some valuable additional detail on TriforceAFL to the research community beyond the original TriforceAFL blog post (2016).

Abstract

In this paper we present Project Triforce, our extension of American Fuzzy Lop (AFL),
allowing it to fuzz virtual machines running under QEMU’s full system emulation mode.
We used this framework to build TriforceLinuxSyscallFuzzer (TLSF) syscall fuzzer, which
has already found several kernel vulnerabilities. This paper details the iteration and
design of both TriforceAFL and TLSF, both of which encountered some interesting
obstacles and discoveries. Then, we’ll analyze crashes found by the fuzzer, and talk
about future directions, including our work fuzzing OpenBSD.

This whitepaper may be downloaded below: