High-Throughput, Formal-Methods-Assisted Fuzzing for LLVM

Abstract

It is very difficult to thoroughly test a compiler, and as a consequence it is common for released versions of production compilers to contain bugs that cause them to crash and to emit incorrect object code. We created alive-mutate, a mutation-based fuzzing tool that takes test cases written by humans and randomly modifies them, based on the hypothesis that while compiler developers are fundamentally good at writing tests, they also tend to miss corner cases. Alive-mutate is integrated with the Alive2 translation validation tool for LLVM, which is useful because it checks the behavior of optimizations for all possible values of input variables. Alive-mutate is also integrated with the LLVM middle-end, allowing it to perform mutations, optimizations, and formal verification of the optimizations all within a single program—avoiding numerous sources of overhead. Alive-mutate's fuzzing throughput is 12x higher, on average, than a fuzzing workflow that runs mutation, optimization, and formal verification in separate processes. So far we have used alive-mutate to find and report 33 previously unknown bugs in LLVM.