LAVA - Large-scale Automated Vulnerability Addition

Evaluating and improving bug-finding tools is currently difficult due to a shortage of ground truth corpora (i.e., software that has known bugs with triggering inputs). LAVA attempts to solve this problem by automatically injecting bugs into software. Every LAVA bug is accompanied by an input that triggers it whereas normal inputs are extremely unlikely to do so. These vulnerabilities are synthetic but, we argue, still realistic, in the sense that they are embedded deep within programs and are triggered by real inputs. Our work forms the basis of an approach for generating large ground-truth vulnerability corpora on demand, enabling rigorous tool evaluation and providing a high-quality target for tool developers.
LAVA is the product of a collaboration between MIT Lincoln Laboratory, NYU, and Northeastern University.

Quick Start
On a system running Ubuntu 16.04, you should be able to just run python2 setup.py. Note that this install script will install packages and make changes to your system. Once it finishes, you should have PANDA installed into panda/build/ (PANDA is used to perform dynamic taint analysis).
Next, run init-host.py to generate a host.json. This file is used by LAVA to store settings specific to your machine. You can edit these settings as necessary, but the default values should work.
Project configurations are located in the target_configs directory, where every configuration is located at target_configs/projectname/projectname.json. Paths specified within these configuration files are relative to values set in your host.json file.
Finally, you can run ./scripts/lava.sh to actually inject bugs into a program. Just provide the name of a project that is in the target_configs directory, for example:

./scripts/lava.sh toy

You should now have a buggy copy of toy!
If you want to inject bugs into a new target, you will likely need to make some modifications. Check out How-to-Lava for guidance.

Documentation
Check out the docs folder to get started.

Current Status

Version 2.0.0
Expected results from test suite:

Project       RESET    CLEAN    ADD      MAKE     TAINT    INJECT   COMP
 blecho        PASS     PASS     PASS     PASS     PASS     PASS     PASS
 libyaml       PASS     PASS     PASS     PASS     PASS     PASS     PASS
 file          PASS     PASS     PASS     PASS     PASS     PASS     PASS
 toy           PASS     PASS     PASS     PASS     PASS     PASS     PASS
 pcre2         PASS     PASS     PASS     PASS     PASS     PASS     PASS
 jq            PASS     PASS     PASS     PASS     PASS     PASS     PASS
 grep          PASS     PASS     PASS     PASS     PASS     FAIL
 libjpeg       PASS     PASS     PASS     PASS     FAIL
 tinyexpr      PASS     PASS     PASS     PASS     FAIL
 duktape       PASS     PASS     PASS     FAIL
 tweetNaCl     PASS     PASS     FAIL
 gzip          FAIL