Gerald and I have (independently) started playing with the American
Fuzzy Lop fuzzer recently [1] as a possibly more intelligent
alternative or complement to our current fuzzing set-up.
It includes a tool afl-cmin that uses its instrumentation to find
"unnecessary" files in a set of inputs (i.e. files that don't exercise
any new paths compared to the rest of the inputs). As an experiment, I
ran this tool against "tshark -nr" on our currently available public
menagerie folder and it cut it about in half.
Before: 5726 files, 1.8G
After: 2423 files, 764M
I suspect with "tshark -nxVr" there are more paths and fewer
duplicates (and it would also take a lot longer to run the script) but
it may be worth investigating regardless. If anybody else is curious
about the results I've made the minimized file list available at [2].
Cheers,
Evan
[1] http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/afl/
[2] https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/171647/mini-menagerie