SeedSmith: LLM-Driven Seed Synthesis for Directed Fuzzing

Arxiv pdf 2026-07-01T00:00:00
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Abstract

Directed fuzzing steers fuzzers toward user-defined sink functions to identify vulnerabilities, but it frequently fails to trigger crashes even after long campaigns. We identify two challenges that prevent directed fuzzers from exposing crashes: incomplete static analysis of indirect calls, which leaves reachable paths invisible to distancebased guidance, and lack of semantic guidance for crash preconditions, which blind mutation cannot satisfy within practical time budgets. A natural intervention point is the initial seed corpus: seeds that encode the right control-flow path and satisfy key crash preconditions shift fuzzing from blind exploration to local refinement. Existing seed generation approaches address neither: grammarbased and format-driven methods produce structurally valid inputs with no sink awareness, while LLM-based methods either lack sink targeting or inherit static analysis limitations through oneshot prompting. We present SeedSmith, an agentic LLM pipeline that replicates a security analysts workflow: starting from a sink, SeedSmith iteratively explores the codebase, resolves indirect calls, identifies crash preconditions, and synthesizes concrete inputs that satisfy them. Because SeedSmith operates as a seed generation front-end, its seeds are fuzzer-agnostic and improve any downstream mutation-based fuzzer without modification. On Magma, fuzzers using SeedSmith seeds achieve geometric mean crash-time speedups of 11 _._ 51 (AFL++) to 14 _._ 66 (AFLGo) over default seeds.

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