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SpecFuzz Emerges To Test Code For Spectre-Style Vulnerabilities

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Security on 4 February 2020 at 09:01 PM EST. 3 Comments

Fuzzing is an important means of finding unintended/invalid behavior within software and now there exists a fuzzer for providing Spectre-type vulnerabilities.

SpecFuzz is a new tool for uncovering possible Spectre vulnerabilities within source code. When compiling the software under test paired with extra instrumentation is able to uncover possible Spectre Variant One vulnerabilities in source code as a result of mispredictions by simulating speculative execution within this fuzzer.

This is the first fuzzer we are aware of focused on finding speculative execution issues. SpecFuzz is open-source via GitHub.

SpecFuzz was presented at FOSDEM 2020 and there is the WebM video recording of the presentation along with the PDF slide deck.

3 Comments

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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.