The paper 'Evaluating Directed Fuzzers: Are We Heading in the Right Direction?', written with Professor Choi Jae-seung of the Department of Computer Science & Engineering as corresponding author, will be presented at the ACM International Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE) 2024. FSE is one of the three leading conferences in software engineering (ICSE, FSE, ASE) and is included in the BK21 list of outstanding conferences at a converted IF of 4. The research was carried out in collaboration with Kim Tae-eun, Lim Seong-jae, Professor Heo Ki-hong and Professor Cha Sang-kil of KAIST.

The paper systematically analyses evaluation methodology for directed fuzzing and discusses problems commonly found in the evaluation processes of existing papers. Directed fuzzing is a technique that intensively tests specific regions designated as targets in a program, and it can be used in a variety of areas including patch testing, crash report reproduction and validation of static analyser alarms. Research and publication on directed fuzzing have been active recently, but research on concrete evaluation methods and pitfalls remains insufficient.

The team surveyed 14 directed fuzzing papers and ran experiments with five directed fuzzing tools, and on that basis identified several problems in the evaluation methods used in existing papers. They also present ways of resolving these problems, which are expected to contribute to greater reproducibility and transparency in future directed fuzzing research.

FSE 2024 will be held in Porto de Galinhas, Brazil, from 15 to 19 July; programme information is available at https://2024.esec-fse.org/program/program-fse-2024/.