PowerFuzz: Power-Based Black-Box Firmware Fuzzing
About
Fuzzing is widely used for software and hardware verification, offering an effective alternative to random testing. While gray-box fuzzers benefit from full visibility into the system under test and can leverage execution feedback such as branch coverage, these approaches are not applicable when verifying systems whose firmware or binaries are not publicly available. In such scenarios, obtaining coverage information for guiding the fuzzer becomes infeasible. In this paper, we introduce PowerFuzz, a statistical black-box fuzzing framework that leverages power side-channel measurements as a substitute for binary instrumentation, requiring no internal visibility into the target firmware. A central challenge in black-box firmware fuzzing is determining the executed branches during test execution. To address this challenge, we use power traces to identify branches utilizing a sliding window followed by a growing window full-trace correlation method. This approach also enables the construction of a high-level control-flow graph of the black-box firmware, which we utilize to drive the fuzzer to unexplored execution paths. Extensive evaluation using three embedded hardware platforms and ten firmware benchmarks demonstrates that PowerFuzz can provide branch coverage comparable (within 13.5%) to gray-box fuzzers while significantly outperforming (up to 22%) state-of-the-art black-box fuzzers.