Papers › RULF: Rust Library Fuzzing via API Dependency Graph Traversal

RULF: Rust Library Fuzzing via API Dependency Graph Traversal

25 Apr 2021arXiv:2104.12064links table onlyarchive 2025-07-28

Jianfeng Jiang, Hui Xu, Yangfan Zhou

The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.

Robustness is a key concern for Rust library development because Rust promises no risks of undefined behaviors if developers use safe APIs only. Fuzzing is a practical approach for examining the robustness of programs. However, existing fuzzing tools are not directly applicable to library APIs due to the absence of fuzz targets. It mainly relies on human efforts to design fuzz targets case by case which is labor-intensive. To address this problem, this paper proposes a novel automated fuzz target generation approach for fuzzing Rust libraries via API dependency graph traversal. We identify several essential requirements for library fuzzing, including validity and effectiveness of fuzz targets, high API coverage, and efficiency. To meet these requirements, we first employ breadth-first search with pruning to find API sequences under a length threshold, then we backward search longer sequences for uncovered APIs, and finally we optimize the sequence set as a set covering problem. We implement our fuzz target generator and conduct fuzzing experiments with AFL++ on several real-world popular Rust projects. Our tool finally generates 7 to 118 fuzz targets for each library with API coverage up to 0.92. We exercise each target with a threshold of 24 hours and find 30 previously-unknown bugs from seven libraries.

PaperPDFCode

Code

artisan-lab/rulf officialmentioned in paper report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections