FUZZUER: Enabling Fuzzing of UEFI Interfaces on EDK-2
Connor Glosner
Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium 2025 · Day 2 · Fuzzing 1
The "FUZZUER: Enabling Fuzzing of UEFI Interfaces on EDK-2" talk, presented by Connor Glosner from Purdue University, introduces a novel framework for automatically generating fuzzing harnesses and identifying vulnerabilities in **UEFI** (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) firmware. The research addresses the critical security implications of firmware vulnerabilities, highlighted by recent incidents like LogoFAIL in 2023, where **memory corruption bugs** in UEFI led to arbitrary code execution during the boot process. These vulnerabilities can enable sophisticated **bootkits** and **rootkits**, often requiring no special privileges to exploit, as demonstrated by the 24 CVEs issued across 11 different vendors in the LogoFAIL incident.
AI review
Solid academic research with a real contribution: automated, static-analysis-driven harness generation for UEFI fuzzing that actually finds bugs manual approaches miss. The 20 new bugs in EDK-2, including 3 that HBFA's hand-crafted harnesses couldn't surface, is the kind of result that validates the architecture rather than just the idea.