Improving AFL++ CmpLog: Tackling the bottlenecks. (arXiv:2211.08357v1 [cs.CR])

The performance of the AFL++ CmpLog feature varies considerably for specific
programs under test (PUTs). In this paper it is demonstrated that the main
cause of the poor performance is low seed entropy, and a lack of deduplication
of magic bytes candidates. An improvement is proposed by mapping comparisons to
input bytes, in order to track which comparisons are controlled by what input
bytes. This mapping is then used to fuzz only the comparison values that are
magic byte candidates …

afl