Parsifal: A Pragmatic Solution to the Binary Parsing Problems

Levillain, Olivier

doi:10.1109/spw.2014.35

Cited by 5 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…The fuzzer by Pan et al [29] leverages higher order attribute grammars to describe length, checksums, and other validation fields, and uses them to generate file format inputs such as PNGs. Parsifal [25] targets both parsing and generation of binary formats. It is, however, limited to fixed size formats.…”

Section: Other Specification Languagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

FormatFuzzer: Effective Fuzzing of Binary File Formats

Dutra¹,

Gopinath²,

Zeller³

2021

Preprint

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Effective fuzzing of programs that process structured binary inputs, such as multimedia files, is a challenging task, since those programs expect a very specific input format. Existing fuzzers, however, are mostly formatagnostic, which makes them versatile, but also ineffective when a specific format is required.We present FormatFuzzer, a generator for format-specific fuzzers. FormatFuzzer takes as input a binary template (a format specification used by the 010 Editor) and compiles it into C++ code that acts as parser, mutator, and highly efficient generator of inputs conforming to the rules of the language.The resulting format-specific fuzzer can be used as a standalone producer or mutator in black-box settings, where no guidance from the program is available. In addition, by providing mutable decision seeds, it can be easily integrated with arbitrary format-agnostic fuzzers such as AFL to make them format-aware. In our evaluation on complex formats such as MP4 or ZIP, FormatFuzzer showed to be a highly effective producer of valid inputs that also detected previously unknown memory errors in ffmpeg and timidity.CCS Concepts: • Software and its engineering → Software testing and debugging; Translator writing systems and compiler generators; Parsers; Syntax.

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Section: Other Specification Languagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

FormatFuzzer: Effective Fuzzing of Binary File Formats

Dutra¹,

Gopinath²,

Zeller³

2021

Preprint

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“…Parsifal [24] is a parser framework that also supports generating output for OCaml. Parsifal structures grammars as an OCaml type that holds an internal model and functions for parsing input and output.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Nail: A Practical Interface Generator for Data Formats

Bangert¹,

Zeldovich²

2014

2014 IEEE Security and Privacy Workshops

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Nail is a tool that greatly reduces the programmer effort for safely parsing and generating data formats defined by a grammar. Nail introduces several key ideas to achieve its goal. First, Nail uses the protocol grammar to define not just the data format, but also the internal object model of the data. Second, Nail eliminates the notion of semantic actions, used by existing parser generators, which reduces the expressive power but allows Nail to both parse data formats and generate them from the internal object model, by maintaining a semantic bijection between the data format and the object model. Third, Nail introduces dependent fields and stream transforms to capture protocol features such as size and offset fields, checksums, and compressed data, which are impractical to express in existing protocol languages. Using Nail, we implement an authoritative DNS server in C in under 300 lines of code and grammar, and an unzip program in C in 220 lines of code and grammar, demonstrating that Nail makes it easy to parse complex real-world data formats. Performance experiments show that a Nail-based DNS server can outperform the widely used BIND DNS server, demonstrating that systems built with Nail can achieve good performance.

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“…For all these reasons, we believe not only that our tool is a direct implementation of our language restriction rules, but also that our implementation choices lead to source code that can more easily be verified. It is interesting that other projects have recently used OCAML to achieve complex tasks: PARSIFAL [21], a binary parser generator, and NOT-QUITE-SO-BROKEN-TLS [17], a new TLS stack written by the Mirage project. In both cases, similar arguments have been argued in favor of OCAML as a safe and expressive language.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Caradoc: A Pragmatic Approach to PDF Parsing and Validation

Endignoux

Levillain

Migeon

2016

2016 IEEE Security and Privacy Workshops (SPW)

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PDF has become a de facto standard for exchanging electronic documents, for visualization as well as for printing. However, it has also become a common delivery channel for malware, and previous work has highlighted features that lead to security issues. In our work, we focus on the structure of the format, independently from specific features. By methodically testing PDF readers against hand-crafted files, we show that the interpretation of PDF files at the structural level may cause some form of denial of service, or be ambiguous and lead to rendering inconsistencies among readers. We then propose a pragmatic solution by restricting the syntax to avoid common errors, and propose a formal grammar for it. We explain how data consistency can be validated at a finer-grained level using a dedicated type checker. Finally, we assess this approach on a set of real-world files and show that our proposals are realistic.

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Parsifal: A Pragmatic Solution to the Binary Parsing Problems

Cited by 5 publications

References 6 publications

FormatFuzzer: Effective Fuzzing of Binary File Formats

FormatFuzzer: Effective Fuzzing of Binary File Formats

Nail: A Practical Interface Generator for Data Formats

Caradoc: A Pragmatic Approach to PDF Parsing and Validation

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