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Hi HN, I'd like to share with you a fuzzer I've been working on. It is a black-box, smart, generation-based fuzzer, that fuzzes APIs based on OpenAPI specification. It all started as a bachelor thesis[0], when I wanted to do something security-related and learn Rust along the way. My colleague @viralpoetry tutored me and so far, we've been able to find bugs in software such as k8s, gitea, and vault[1].
As for the choice of language, Rust proved to be a good decision, even though, one would think that dynamic languages are better suited for fuzzing (at least that was the choice for API fuzzers that I looked into). Thanks to Rust's type system, I was able to deserialize the OpenAPI specification to structs and traverse them when creating a fuzzing payload in a type-safe way. Other fuzzers load the specification to a dictionary/hashmap and then fail during the traversal because of some missing key they expected.
0: https://github.com/matusf/bachelor-thesis/releases/download/...
1: https://github.com/matusf/openapi-fuzzer#findings
Yes, we looked into it. There is a chapter in my thesis[0] about RESTler and comparison with OpenAPI fuzzer. The main difference between those two fuzzer is that RESTler is a statefull fuzzer and OpenAPI fuzzer is a stateless fuzzer.
Thanks to being statefull, RESTler is able to analyze a dependencies between a requests. For example, it will not call and endpoint to get user details before calling endpoint to create a user. This should make it more efficient because it does not waste requests to calling endpoint that will return 404.
On the other hand, fuzzing is all about trying to supply unexpected input to the software. Therefore, OpenAPI fuzzer makes those requests, since it may cause some undefined behavior when we try to get user before creating one.
So while RESTler tries to check some invariant (for example if deleted user cannot be accessed) OpenAPI fuzzer tries to cause the service to crash by invalid input. RESTler is usually not able to crash the service by providing invalid input, because it needs to keep the fuzzing dictionary small (bigger dictionary would make the dependency finding slow). So I think, they complements each other nicely.
Another difference it in reporting error. RESTler considers only status code 500 as an error. However, OpenAPI specification states all possible status codes that we can get from an endpoint. OpenAPI fuzzer utilizes this and reports every time it receives and unexpected status code.
0: https://github.com/matusf/bachelor-thesis/releases/download/...
There's another one here by Microsoft - this is cool though! great to see more Rust tools.
https://github.com/microsoft/restler-fuzzer
Yes, it does. As for the parsing, it relies on the openapiv3[0] library, which supports OAS 3.1.
0: https://github.com/glademiller/openapiv3