Fuzzing has become a key search-based technique for software testing, but continuous fuzzing campaigns consume substantial computational resources and generate significant carbon footprints. Existing grey-box fuzzing approaches like AFL++ focus primarily on coverage maximisation, without considering the energy costs of exploring different execution paths. This paper presents GreenAFL, an energy-aware framework that incorporates power consumption into the fuzzing heuristics to reduce the environmental impact of automated testing whilst maintaining coverage. GreenAFL introduces two key modifications to traditional fuzzing workflows: energy-aware corpus minimisation considering power consumption when reducing initial corpora, and energy-guided heuristics that direct mutation towards high-coverage, low-energy inputs. We conduct an ablation study comparing vanilla AFL++, energy-based corpus minimisation, and energy-based heuristics to evaluate the individual contributions of each component. Our evaluation shows up to 7.4% lower energy usage and 7.1% lower throughput while maintaining or improving coverage, with best-case coverage gains of 2.6%.

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Fuzz Smarter, Not Harder: Towards Greener Fuzzing with GreenAFL

  • Ayse Irmak Ercevik,
  • Aidan Dakhama,
  • Melane Navaratnarajah,
  • Yazhuo Cao,
  • Leo Fernandes

摘要

Fuzzing has become a key search-based technique for software testing, but continuous fuzzing campaigns consume substantial computational resources and generate significant carbon footprints. Existing grey-box fuzzing approaches like AFL++ focus primarily on coverage maximisation, without considering the energy costs of exploring different execution paths. This paper presents GreenAFL, an energy-aware framework that incorporates power consumption into the fuzzing heuristics to reduce the environmental impact of automated testing whilst maintaining coverage. GreenAFL introduces two key modifications to traditional fuzzing workflows: energy-aware corpus minimisation considering power consumption when reducing initial corpora, and energy-guided heuristics that direct mutation towards high-coverage, low-energy inputs. We conduct an ablation study comparing vanilla AFL++, energy-based corpus minimisation, and energy-based heuristics to evaluate the individual contributions of each component. Our evaluation shows up to 7.4% lower energy usage and 7.1% lower throughput while maintaining or improving coverage, with best-case coverage gains of 2.6%.