An Intel project developed the past several years was kAFL-Fuzzer as a hardware-assisted feedback fuzzer for x86 virtual machines (VMs) to help with security. While it saw a lot of work in prior years, development activity slowed down last year and now the project has been formally ended.
Joining other Intel open-source projects ended in recent months amid various open-source setbacks over the past year due to layoffs and corporate restructuring, the kAF-Fuzzer project has been formally archived. The kAFL-Fuzzer was a fuzzer for x86 VMs and worked on by Intel engineers as part of their security efforts into virtual machine introspection and fuzzing.
The kafl.fuzzer GitHub repository was archived this week by Intel with the usual notice that the project is now unmaintained.
The kafl.fuzzer is the fuzzer front-end to the project. Notably the kAFL repository hasn’t been archived although hasn’t seen any commits in months besides documentation and CI updates. The kafl.linux repository also isn’t archived either but hasn’t seen any commits since last year. But with the fuzzer front-end now archived following no recent activity, this looks to be another area that Intel has been cutting back on, which is too bad considering the security aspect and cloud/VM usage continuing to be so prevalent these days.
Those wanting to learn more about what was the Intel Labs kAFL project can do so via the GitHub documentation area for fuzzing VM kernels / firmware / operating systems. kAFL itself was born out of university research work from Ruhr-Universität Bochum.
