Fuzzing: Brute Force Vulnerability Discovery

19. In-Memory Fuzzing

“It is white.”

—George W. Bush, after being asked by a child in Britain what the White House was like, July 19, 2001

In this chapter, we introduce the notion of in-memory fuzzing, a novel approach to fuzzing that has received little public attention and for which no full-featured proof of concept tools have yet been publicly released. In essence, this technique aims to transition fuzzing from the familiar client–server (or client–target) model, to a target-only model residing solely in memory. Although technically this is a more complex approach that requires strong low-level knowledge of assembly language, process memory layout, and process instrumentation, there are a number of benefits to the technique that ...