Encryption - a curse and a blessing at the same time

Digital communication in today’s world has a particularly high status in our society. Financial transactions are conducted via online banking, private communication is increasingly limited to digital messenger services, and even health data is experiencing a shift to digital form. Due to the growth of such sensitive digital data, the need for secure transmission of such data has become increasingly important over the past decades. With the introduction of high-performance and digitally secure cryptographic methods, such as SSL/TLS, today’s digital communications are predominantly encrypted. Whereas back then, for example, an attacker could hang himself between the client and the server and read the data traffic without encryption, today all he sees is a jumble of letters. Encryption is truly a boon for protecting sensitive personal data, but it also has its drawbacks, as with almost everything. Encrypted communications negate the ability to analyze communications, which is very relevant when reverse engineering malware or researching vulnerabilities.

Fuzzing Network Applications with AFL and libdesock

Fuzzing network servers with AFL is challenging since AFL provides its input via stdin or command line arguments while servers get their input over network connections. As the popularity of AFL grew, many attempts have been made of fuzzing popular servers like apache and nginx using different techniques and hacky workarounds. However an off-the-shelf network fuzzing solution for AFL didn’t exist for a long time until so-called “desocketing” tools emerged. These desocketing tools enabled network fuzzing without making a lot of additional modifications to the program under test and quickly became widely used in combination with AFL.