Advanced Fuzzing and Crash Analysis
Richard Johnson
Dates
11th-14th of May 2026Capacity
24Price
4.800€Overview
This class is designed to introduce students to the best tools and technology available for automating vulnerability discovery and crash triage with a focus on delivering a practical approach to applying this technology in real deployments.
We will take a deep dive into fuzzing, covering all aspects of this practical approach to finding bugs including targeting open source libraries, binary targets, network protocols, and OS kernels with full system snapshot fuzzing. Class attendees will learn to use the best tools and techniques available to fuzz several real-world pieces of software on both Windows and Linux. Students will learn strategies for analyzing attack surface, writing grammars, and generating effective corpus. We will explore in detail the latest innovations such as harnessing code coverage for guided evolutionary fuzzing and symbolic reasoning for concolic fuzzing.
We approach crash analysis through the lens of scriptable debuggers and program analysis. We will apply tools like reverse debugging and memory debuggers to assist in interactively diagnosing root cause of crashes. Then we will leverage the power of dynamic taint tracking and graph slicing to help isolate the path of user controlled input in the program and identify the exact input bytes influencing a crash. Lastly, we will look at possible ways to determine the impact of a vulnerability.
This class will focus on x86/x64 architecture and target file parsers, network parsers and kernel attack surface on both Windows and Linux environments.
Who Should Attend
This class is meant for professional developers or security researchers looking to add an automation component to their software security analysis. Students wanting to learn a programmatic and tool driven approach to analyzing software vulnerabilities and crash triage will benefit from this course.
- Key Learning Objectives
- Learn an effective strategy for using the latest tools & technology to discover vulnerabilities
- Master the latest fuzzing techniques for file, network, and browser fuzzing
- Learn grammar fuzzing, evolutionary fuzzing, in-memory fuzzing, and symbolic fuzzing
- Learn to fuzz anything with emulation based full system snapshot fuzzing
- Best practices for corpus generation, fuzzer deployment, and targeting
- Leverage dynamic binary translation for efficient tracing and deep program inspection
- Learn how to leverage time travel debugging for crash triage on Linux and Windows
- Apply powerful techniques like taint analysis and graph slicing towards crash analysis
Prerequisite Knowledge
Students should be prepared to tackle challenging and diverse subject matter and be comfortable writing functions in C/C++ to complete exercises involving completing plugins for the discussed platforms. Attendees should have basic experience with debugging native x86/x64 memory corruption vulnerabilities on Linux or Windows.
Hardware / Software Requirements
Students should have the latest VMware Player, Workstation, or Fusion working on their machine.
Class Topics
Analysis of generational and mutational fuzzing
- Fuzzing history and theory
- Grammar generators and mutation fuzzing
- Protocol and file format grammars
- Crash detection and memory debuggers
Fuzzing file and network parsers on Linux
- Targeted packet fuzzing with Mutiny
- Deep dive on coverage guided fuzzing
- Fuzz any Ubuntu/Debian package with AFL
- Modifying targets and writing harnesses with LibFuzzer
- Fuzzing closed source parsers with QEMU
- Extending mutation fuzzing with grammars
Fuzzing Edge Device Linux Firmware (new!)
- Discussion of previous pwn2own embedded targets
- Fuzzing closed source parsers with QEMU
- Fuzzing non-x64 binary targets
- Extending mutation fuzzing with grammars
Fuzzing Windows Applications
- Optimizing harnesses for fuzzing public APIs
- Hooking closed source command line applications
- Deep hooks into private library functions with global state
- Reverse Engineering C++ classes to fuzz internal functions
- Fuzzing internal data streams in complex OLE objects
Crash Analysis
- Introduction to time travel debugging
- Crash analysis with reverse debugging on Linux
- Crash analysis with reverse debugging on Windows
Taint assisted root cause analysis
- Introduction to dynamic taint analysis
- Taint slicing for root cause analysis
Symbolic and Concolic Execution
- Introduction to constraint solving
- Concolic execution for test case generation
- Hybrid fuzzing with concolic execution
Bonus Self-Guided Material
- Fuzzing Browsers with Domato
- Self learning workbook and coding exercise
Note: Attendees will receive all materials for the above topics, however new snapshot fuzzing material may limit the time available to cover some of the later topics and the browser fuzzing module has been converted to self-learning. The topics are covered in sequential order.
Bio
Richard Johnson is a computer security specialist with a focus on software vulnerability analysis. Founder of Fuzzing IO and Metaframe AI, research and development companies offering professional training and services in cybersecurity and agentic AI. Richard offers over 20 years of professional expertise and leadership in the information security industry, previously Director of Security Research at Oracle Cloud leading software and hardware vulnerability research teams and at Cisco Talos as the founder of the VulnDev team that finds hundreds of zeroday vulnerabilities each year. Richard has delivered training and presented annually at premier industry conferences for over two decades including Black Hat, Defcon, OffensiveCon, RECON, CanSecWest, and many more.
Richard was also co-founder of the Uninformed Journal and was on program committees for the USENIX Workshop on Offensive Technologies, Recon, Hack in the Box, and Toorcon.
Richard Johnson
