Second, I describe recent work in "whitebox fuzz testing," a new approach to finding security bugs. Security bugs cost millions of dollars to patch after the fact, so we want to find and fix them as early in the deployment cycle as possible. I review previous fuzz testing work, how fuzzing has been responsible for serious security bugs, and classic fuzz testing's inability to deal with "unlikely" code paths. I then show how marrying the idea of dynamic test generation with fuzz testing overcomes these shortcomings, but raises significant scaling problems. Two recent tools, SAGE at Microsoft Research, and SmartFuzz at Berkeley, overcome these scaling problems; I present results on the effectiveness of these tools on commodity Windows and Linux media playing software. Finally, I close with directions for leveraging cloud computing to improve developers' testing and debugging experience.
The talk describes joint work with Ari Juels and David Wagner (RFID), and with Patrice Godefroid, Michael Y. Levin, and Xue Cong Li and David Wagner (Whitebox Fuzzing).
Bio: David Molnar is a PhD candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, degree expected Spring 2009. His work centers on privacy, cryptography, and computer security, advised by David Wagner. Most recently, he has been interested in RFID privacy, and in applying constraint solvers to finding software bugs at scale (see http://www.metafuzz.com). He is a previous National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow and Intel Open Collaboration Research Graduate Fellow.
Refreshments will be provided at 10:45