Darknet – The Darkside

cross_fuzz is an amazingly effective but notoriously annoying cross-document DOM binding fuzzer that helped identify about one hundred bugs in all browsers on the market – many of said bugs exploitable – and it is still finding more.

The fuzzer owes much of its efficiency to dynamically generating extremely long-winding sequences of DOM operations across multiple documents, inspecting returned objects, recursing into them, and creating circular node references that stress-test garbage collection mechanisms.

The cross_fuzz fuzzing Algorithm

1. Open two windows with documents of any (DOM-enabled) type. Simple HTML, XHTML, and SVG documents are randomly selected as targets by default – although any other, possibly plugin-supported formats could be targeted instead.
2. Crawl DOM hierarchy of the first document, collecting encountered object references for later reuse. Visited objects and collected references are tagged using an injected property to avoid infinite recursion; a secondary blacklist is used to prevent navigating away or descending into the master window. Critically, random shuffling and recursion fanout control are used to ensure good coverage.
3. Repeat DOM crawl, randomly tweaking encountered object properties by setting them to a one of the previously recorded references (or, with some probability, to one of a handful of hardcoded “interesting” values).
4. Repeat DOM crawl, randomly calling encountered object methods. Call parameters are synthesized using collected references and “interesting” values, as noted above. If a method returns an object, its output is subsequently crawled and tweaked in a similar manner.
5. Randomly destroy first document using one of the several possible methods, toggle garbage collection.
6. Perform the same set of crawl & tweak operations for the second document, but use references collected from the first document for overwriting properties and calling methods in the second one.
7. Randomly destroy document windows, carry over a percentage of collected references to the next fuzzing cycle.

This design can make it unexpectedly difficult to get clean, deterministic repros; to that effect, in the current versions of all the affected browsers, we are still seeing a collection of elusive problems when running the tool – and some not-so-elusive ones. I believe that at this point, a broader community involvement may be instrumental to tracking down and resolving these bugs.

I also believe that at least one of the vulnerabilities discovered by cross_fuzz may be known to third parties – which makes getting this tool out a priority.

You can download cross_fuzz here:

http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/cross_fuzz

Or read more here.