OSS-Fuzz: Five months later, and rewarding projects

Five months ago, we announced OSS-Fuzz, Google’s effort to help make open source software more secure and stable. Since then, our robot army has been working hard at fuzzing, processing 10 trillion test inputs a day. Thanks to the efforts of the open source community who have integrated a total of 47 projects, we’ve found over 1,000 bugs (264 of which are potential security vulnerabilities).

Notable results

OSS-Fuzz has found numerous security vulnerabilities in several critical open source projects: 10 in FreeType2, 17 in FFmpeg, 33 in LibreOffice, 8 in SQLite 3, 10 in GnuTLS, 25 in PCRE2, 9 in gRPC, and 7 in Wireshark, etc. We’ve also had at least one bug collision with another independent security researcher (CVE-2017-2801). (Some of the bugs are still view restricted so links may show smaller numbers.)

Once a project is integrated into OSS-Fuzz, the continuous and automated nature of OSS-Fuzz means that we often catch these issues just hours after the regression is introduced into the upstream repository, before any users are affected.

Fuzzing not only finds memory safety related bugs, it can also find correctness or logic bugs. One example is a carry propagating bug in OpenSSL (CVE-2017-3732).

Finally, OSS-Fuzz has reported over 300 timeout and out-of-memory failures (~75% of which got fixed). Not every project treats these as bugs, but fixing them enables OSS-Fuzz to find more interesting bugs.

Announcing rewards for open source projects

We believe that user and internet security as a whole can benefit greatly if more open source projects include fuzzing in their development process. To this end, we’d like to encourage more projects to participate and adopt the ideal integration guidelines that we’ve established.

Combined with fixing all the issues that are found, this is often a significant amount of work for developers who may be working on an open source project in their spare time. To support these projects, we are expanding our existing Patch Rewards program to include rewards for the integration of fuzz targets into OSS-Fuzz.

To qualify for these rewards, a project needs to have a large user base and/or be critical to global IT infrastructure. Eligible projects will receive $1,000 for initial integration, and up to $20,000 for ideal integration (the final amount is at our discretion). You have the option of donating these rewards to charity instead, and Google will double the amount.

To qualify for the ideal integration reward, projects must show that:

• Fuzz targets are checked into their upstream repository and integrated in the build system with sanitizer support (up to $5,000).
• Fuzz targets are efficient and provide good code coverage (>80%) (up to $5,000). 
• Fuzz targets are part of the official upstream development and regression testing process, i.e. they are maintained, run against old known crashers and the periodically updated corpora (up to $5,000).
• The last $5,000 is a “l33t” bonus that we may reward at our discretion for projects that we feel have gone the extra mile or done something really awesome.

We’ve already started to contact the first round of projects that are eligible for the initial reward. If you are the maintainer or point of contact for one of these projects, you may also reach out to us in order to apply for our ideal integration rewards.

The future

We’d like to thank the existing contributors who integrated their projects and fixed countless bugs. We hope to see more projects integrated into OSS-Fuzz, and greater adoption of fuzzing as standard practice when developing software.

By Oliver Chang, Abhishek Arya (Security Engineers, Chrome Security), Kostya Serebryany (Software Engineer, Dynamic Tools), and Josh Armour (Security Program Manager)