Development of a fuzzing tool for a mobile phone browser

• Main Author: Soo, Jian Wei.
• Other Authors: Lau Chiew Tong
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2012
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Computer science and engineering::Software::Software engineering
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/48626
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

With the increase in number of people relying on mobile devices in their everyday lives, the more enticing these devices become targets to thieves and other nefarious types. In recent years, IT security researchers have expressed rising concerns over vulnerabilities in mobile Web browsers. This is because of the major threats that the identified liabilities pose towards compromising cellphone security, which could lead to an increasing number of successful attacks. This phenomenon is especially true on smartphone platforms. They often do not receive critical updates or security patches in time to remediate the identified problems, thus leaving them susceptible to new attacks and exploits. The exponential growth in demand for mobile security sees a corresponding surge in anti-hacking tools as well as penetration testing tools catered for the mobile smartphone platforms. Software testing through fuzzing, in particular, has rapidly gained a noteworthy regard in the mobile software security market for effective identification of vulnerabilities and exploits. The chief purpose of the project is to develop a fuzzing tool specifically devised to access the reliability of the MobileSafari Web browser. There is a wide variety of fuzzing tools available for public use, both commercial and open-source. In this project, they are being discussed and compared upon to ascertain the most appropriate fuzzing tool to search and identify vulnerabilities in the targeted Web browser.