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mrkmarron | 1 year ago

FYI playing Super Mario with fuzzing (AFL) was done in a fun 2020 S&P paper. Also finds bugs and security issues.

"IJON: Exploring Deep State Spaces via Fuzzing" https://casa.rub.de/fileadmin/img/Publikationen_PDFs/2020_IJ...

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chc4|1 year ago

A lot of fuzzers use Mario or other simple games as an internal testcase. I'm aware of a hypervisor fuzzer from 2016 that did it, and I'm positive there are others (both before and since). Hell, tom7 has a fuzzer for exploring program states that uses Super Mario Bros as the example from 2013 (https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tom7/mario/mario.pdf, plus a youtube video https://youtu.be/xOCurBYI_gY), and he's definitely not the first either.

wwilson|1 year ago

We are huge fans of tom7 and that paper was one of our inspirations for using NES as a domain for researching autonomous state space search! I think he does a very good job of explaining why the problem is hard.

mrkmarron|1 year ago

Thanks for sharing, I felt like there were earlier but the x,y trick jumped out at me and that was the one I remembered off the top of my head.

wwilson|1 year ago

Thanks for flagging this! The work we're announcing today was completed in 2018, and we have since moved on to much more challenging problems both in the Nintendo domain and elsewhere. Totally not looking to pick a fight over priority though. This is such a hilariously understudied and under-explored area, we really value anybody else who's trying to work on these problems.

mrkmarron|1 year ago

I think you underestimate the level to which this area has been studied. And I wish you would talk about these new results then instead of announcing 5+ year old results then.

It would be great to see progress in this area (not my primary area of work BTW) but I am not seeing anything here, technically, that is going to make that happen -- maybe it is just getting all the parts in place and magic happens. It just makes me scratch my head a bit.

infogulch|1 year ago

Have any of these methods found clips and speedrunning shortcuts? Examples: Clip the base of the flagpole to skip some animation time. Clip into and walk below the floor to run past obstacles. Etc.