A Novel Seed Generation Approach for Vulnerability Mining Based on Generative Adversarial Networks and Attention Mechanisms

Coverage-guided fuzzing has been widely applied in software error and security vulnerability detection. The fuzzing technique based on AFL (American Fuzzy Loop) is a common coverage-guided fuzzing method. The code coverage during AFL fuzzing is highly dependent on the quality of the initial seeds. If the selected seeds’ quality is poor, the AFL may not be able to detect program paths in a targeted manner, resulting in wasted time and computational resources. To solve the problems that the seed selection strategy in traditional AFL fuzzing cannot quickly and effectively generate high-quality seed sets and the mutated test cases cannot reach deeper paths and trigger security vulnerabilities, this paper proposes an attention mechanism-based generative adversarial network (GAN) seed generation approach for vulnerability mining, which can learn the characteristics and distribution of high-quality test samples during the testing process and generate high-quality seeds for fuzzing. The proposed method improves the GAN by introducing fully connected neural networks to balance the competitive adversarial process between discriminators and generators and incorporating attention mechanisms, greatly improving the quality of generated seeds. Our experimental results show that the seeds generated by the proposed method have significant improvements in coverage, triggering unique crashes and other indicators and improving the efficiency of AFL fuzzing.