DynSQL: Stateful Fuzzing for Database Management Systems with Complex and Valid SQL Query Generation

Database management systems (DBMSs) are essential parts of modern software. To ensure the security of DBMSs, recent approaches apply fuzzing to testing DBMSs by automatically generating SQL queries. However, existing DBMS fuzzers are limited in generating complex and valid queries, as they heavily rely on their predefined grammar models and fixed knowledge about DBMSs, but do not capture DBMS-specific state information. As a result, these approaches miss many deep bugs in DBMSs.

In this paper, we propose a novel stateful fuzzing approach to effectively test DBMSs and find deep bugs. Our basic idea is that after DBMSs process each SQL statement, there is useful state information that can be dynamically collected to facilitate later query generation. Based on this idea, our approach performs dynamic query interaction to incrementally generate complex and valid SQL queries, using the captured state information. To further improve the validity of generated queries, our approach uses the error status of query processing to filter out invalid test cases. We implement our approach as a fully automatic fuzzing framework, DynSQL. DynSQL is evaluated on 6 widely-used DBMSs (including SQLite, MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, MonetDB, and ClickHouse) and finds 40 unique bugs. Among these bugs, 38 have been confirmed, 21 have been fixed, and 19 have been assigned with CVE IDs. In our evaluation, DynSQL outperforms other state-of-the-art DBMS fuzzers, achieving 41% higher code coverage and finding many bugs missed by other fuzzers.