When fuzzing a proprietary file-processing program, one typically executes the whole program repeatedly with sampled input files, and distinguishes between normal and abnormal termination. While this works well for many command-line utilities, it is more complicated for programs that usually do not terminate after input file processing. Many real-world applications are examples of such programs, in particular, those with a graphical user interface (GUI), such as image editors, media players and document viewers. In these cases, the fuzzer has to define the scope of the execution and forcefully terminate the program under test.

In order to efficiently fuzz test file-processing programs with a GUI, a standard approach is to define a dedicated testing harness, which executes the file processing in isolation and strips irrelevant program parts. However, this either requires the source code of the program or an expert’s effort in reverse engineering. Alternative approaches work on the unmodified binary of the program, and use a heuristic to decide when the input processing is likely done. For example, one can terminate the program after a fixed timeout or once its CPU usage has dropped below a threshold. We show that these heuristics, while simple to implement, are inefficient and ineffective.

We present Terminator, a fully-automated approach to facilitate efficient fuzzing of closed-source file-processing programs with a GUI. Terminator modifies the binary of the program under test so that it automatically terminates when code coverage stops increasing without user interaction. Consequently, Terminator (1) ensures that the program terminates soon after the input processing instead of waiting for user interaction, and, at the same time, (2) prevents premature termination during input processing. We show that Terminator outperforms the timeout and CPU usage heuristics and significantly increases fuzzing efficiency.