coresight-trace is a hardware-assisted process tracer for binary-only fuzzing on ARM64 Linux.

CoreSight, implemented as hardware on some Arm-based SoCs for debugging purposes, enables tracing CPU execution with low-overhead. This project employs the feature to generate code coverage for fuzzing without compile-time instrumentation.

NOTE: coresight-trace is in the early development stage. Not applicable for production use.

Unlike Intel PT, not every Arm-based SoC has CoreSight as its design varies. The "Limitations" section describes the detailed hardware requirements and limitations. coresight-trace supports the following boards (SoCs):

• NVIDIA Jetson TX2 (NVIDIA Parker)
• NVIDIA Jetson Nano (NVIDIA Tegra X1)
• GIGABYTE R181-T90 (Marvell ThunderX2 CN99XX)

To port coresight-trace to other boards, consult the SoC the documents whether CoreSight is available on the target.

We tested coresight-trace on ARM64 Ubuntu 20.04 and 18.04.

coresight-trace requires bare-metal ARM64 Linux to work because it needs to access physical memories to operate CoreSight components directly. It is built on the top of customized CSAL, which means it does not work on VMs or containers.

coresight-trace also requires the u-dma-buf kernel module to use the ETR trace sink. It allocates a DMA-capable continuous physical memory region, and the tracer uses the region to store trace data.

To use coresight-trace for fuzzing, clone the AFL CoreSight mode and check out this repository as a submodule to preserve the directory structure.

• RICSec/CSAL
• RICSec/coresight-decoder
• ikwzm/u-dma-buf

Note that coresight-decoder requires capstone disassembly library with version 4.0 or later. Do not use the older version (e.g. libcapstone-dev from Ubuntu apt packages).

coresight-trace has two build targets: cs-trace and cs-proxy. cs-trace is a standalone process tracing application, which runs the traced target using fork exec and outputs raw trace data. cs-proxy is a proxy application for AFL CoreSight mode, behaving like an AFL fork server. To use cs-proxy for fuzzing, read the AFL CoreSight mode README in addition to this document.

Checkout and build:

git clone https://github.com/RICSecLab/coresight-trace.git
cd coresight-trace
git submodule update --init
DEFAULT_BOARD="Your Target Board" make

It will biuld cs-proxy only if the repository is located under the AFL CoreSight mode directory (In case of symbolic link include/afl destination ../../../include exists).

Before run cs-trace or cs-proxy, build and install the u-dma-buf kernel module. The allocated DMA region size is 512 KiB (0x80000) for instance:

cd u-dma-buf
make
sudo insmod u-dma-buf.ko udmabuf0=0x80000

It creates a /dev/udmabuf0 pseudo-device.

Run cs-trace as root with specifying a traced target after --.

sudo ./cs-trace -- path/to/bin

After the target exited, it generates the raw CoreSight trace binary cstrace.bin, and the coresight-decoder arguments list text file decoderargs.txt under the current directory.

To generate the coverage bitmap edge_coverage_bitmap.out using coresight-decoder from the trace binary, run:

./coresight-decoder/processor `cat decoderargs.txt`

Here is a pseudo Makefile target that does the above commands:

make decode

This runs $(TRACEE) (tests/fib by default) as a trace target under trace/$(shell date %Y-%m-%d-%H-%M-%S) directory, then runs decoder.

cs-trace accepts some options. -h or --help for available options list.

coresight-trace uses RICSec/coresight-decoder, a new CoreSight trace decoder optimized for fuzzing feedback. It currently supports AFL-style edge coverage and PTrix-style path coverage. Refer to the coresight-decoder README for further infomation.

Currently, coresight-trace supports trace sources with ARM64 ETMv4 and later. 32-bit Arm or ETMv3 or earlier is not supported. It also requires an ETR trace sink to achieve better performance.

Please open GitHub Issues and Pull Requests. All commits must include a Signed-off-by line using git commit --signoff to enforce the Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO).

coresight-trace is released under the Apache License, Version 2.0.

This project has received funding from the Acquisition, Technology & Logistics Agency (ATLA) under the Innovative Science and Technology Initiative for Security 2020 (JPJ004596).