Fuzzm: Finding Memory Bugs through Binary-Only Instrumentation and Fuzzing of WebAssembly

Abstract: WebAssembly binaries are often compiled from memory-unsafe languages, such as C and C++. Because of WebAssembly's linear memory and missing protection features, e.g., stack canaries, source-level memory vulnerabilities are exploitable in compiled WebAssembly binaries, sometimes even more easily than in native code. This paper addresses the problem of detecting such vulnerabilities through the first binary-only fuzzer for WebAssembly. Our approach, called Fuzzm, combines canary instrumentation to detect overflows and underflows on the stack and the heap, an efficient coverage instrumentation, a WebAssembly VM, and the input generation algorithm of the popular AFL fuzzer. Besides as an oracle for fuzzing, our canaries also serve as a stand-alone binary hardening technique to prevent the exploitation of vulnerable binaries in production. We evaluate Fuzzm with 28 real-world WebAssembly binaries, some compiled from source and some found in the wild without source code. The fuzzer explores thousands of execution paths, triggers dozens of crashes, and performs hundreds of program executions per second. When used for binary hardening, the approach prevents previously published exploits against vulnerable WebAssembly binaries while imposing low runtime overhead.