We are dedicated to everything around fuzzing, our main and most well known
contribution is the fuzzer afl++ which is part of all major Unix
distributions (e.g. Debian, Arch, FreeBSD, etc.) and is deployed on Google's
oss-fuzz and clusterfuzz. It is rated the top fuzzer on Google's fuzzbench.
We are four individuals from Europe supported by a large community.
All our tools are open source.
afl++ inherited it's documentation from the original Google afl project. Since then it has been massively improved - feature and performance wise - and although the documenation has likewise been continued it has grown out of proportion. The documentation is done by non-natives to the English language, plus none of us has a writer background.
We see questions on afl++ usage on mailing lists (e.g. afl-users), discord channels, web forums and as issues in our repository.
This only increases as afl++ has been on the top of Google's fuzzbench statistics (which measures the performance of fuzzers) and is now being integrated in Google's oss-fuzz and clusterfuzz - and is in many Unix packaging repositories, e.g. Debian, FreeBSD, etc.
afl++ now has 44 (!) documentation files with 13k total lines of content. This is way too much.
Hence afl++ needs a complete overhaul of it's documentation, both on a organisation/structural level as well as the content.
Overall the following actions have to be performed:
- Create a better structure of documentation so it is easier to find the information that is being looked for, combining and/or splitting up the existing documents as needed.
- Rewrite some documentation to remove duplication. Several information is present several times in the documentation. These should be removed to where needed so that we have as little bloat as possible.
- The documents have been written and modified by a lot of different people, most of them non-native English speaker. Hence an overall review where parts should be rewritten has to be performed and then the rewrite done.
- Create a cheat-sheet for a very short best-setup build and run of afl++
- Pictures explain more than 1000 words. We need at least 4 images that
explain the workflow with afl++:
- the build workflow
- the fuzzing workflow
- the fuzzing campaign management workflow
- the overall workflow that is an overview of the above
- maybe more? where the technical writes seems it necessary for understanding.
Requirements:
- Documentation has to be in Markdown format
- Images have to be either in SVG or PNG format.
- All documentation should be (moved) in(to) docs/
The project does not require writing new documentation or tutorials beside the cheat sheet. The technical information for the cheat sheet will be provided by us.
afl++ is a the highest performant fuzzer publicly available - but is also the most feature rich and complex. With the publicity of afl++' success and deployment in Google projects internally and externally and availability as a package on most Linux distributions we see more and more issues being created and help requests on our Discord channel that would not be necessary if people would have read through all our documentation - which is unrealistic.
We expect the the new documenation after this project to be cleaner, easier accessible and lighter to digest by our users, resulting in much less help requests. On the other hand the amount of users using afl++ should increase as well as it will be more accessible which would also increase questions again - but overall resulting in a reduction of help requests.
In numbers: we currently have per week on average 5 issues on Github, 10 questions on discord and 1 on mailing lists that would not be necessary with perfect documentation and perfect people.
We would consider this project a success if afterwards we only have 2 issues on Github and 3 questions on discord anymore that would be answered by reading the documentation. The mailing list is usually used by the most novice users and we don't expect any less questions there.
We have zero experience with technical writers, so this is very hard for us to calculate. We expect it to be a lot of work though because of the amount of documentation we have that needs to be restructured and partially rewritten (44 documents with 13k total lines of content).
We assume the daily rate of a very good and experienced technical writer in times of a pandemic to be ~500$ (according to web research), and calculate the overall amout of work to be around 20 days for everything incl. the graphics (but again - this is basically just guessing).
Technical Writer 10000$ Volunteer stipends 0$ (waved) T-Shirts for the top 10 contributors and helpers to this documentation project: 10 afl++ logo t-shirts 20$ each 200$ 10 shipping cost of t-shirts 10$ each 100$
Total: 10.300$ (in the submission form 10.280$ was entered)
We have participated in Google Summer of Code in 2020 and hope to be selected again in 2021.
We have no experience with a technical writer, but we will support that person with video calls, chats, emails and messaging, provide all necessary information and write technical contents that is required for the success of this project. It is clear to us that a technical writer knows how to write, but cannot know the technical details in a complex tooling like in afl++. This guidance, input, etc. has to come from us.