Operating System

In the following chapter, I will highlight some details about which operation systems I chose. Also, I want to discuss what other options exist and why you should think about them.

Choice of operating system

There is quite a number of operating systems available for this board. For my prototype, I chose a standard Ubuntu Xenial, since that seemed to be the easiest way to get it running. In the beginning, I didn’t even thought about it too much, but right now I am think about getting an Android image running (version 7 is officially supported, Android 8 build instructions for Pine64 are floating around). Why you may asking? Reading Googles AddressSanitizers manual, it looks like Android is the only operating system on ARM which is officially supported by ASAN (!!). I didn’t tried it out yet, but I guess I am giving it a shot in the near future.

If you don’t know about the memory error detector AddressSanitizer (ASAN), go check out the documentation provided by Google. @lcamtufs remarks about using ASAN in a fuzzing process is worth a read, since he describes a lot about the potential caveats in using ASAN as well as other possibilties to find non-crashing bugs.

Besides that, I couldn’t think about too much constraints in the choice of operation system for my fuzzing purposes, as long as all the software I want to use in my process is compatible with the operating system.