Linux Kernel Fuzzing

Introduction

syzkaller is an unsupervised coverage-guided kernel fuzzer

Setup: Ubuntu host, QEMU vm, x86-64 kernel

These are the instructions on how to fuzz the x86-64 kernel in a QEMU with Ubuntu on the host machine and Debian Bullseye in the QEMU instances.

In the instructions below, the $VAR notation (e.g. $GCC, $KERNEL, etc.) is used to denote paths to directories that are either created when executing the instructions (e.g. when unpacking GCC archive, a directory will be created), or that you have to create yourself before running the instructions. Substitute the values for those variables manually.

sudo apt update
sudo apt install make gcc flex bison libncurses-dev libelf-dev libssl-dev

If your distro's GCC is older, it's preferable to get the latest GCC from this list. Download and unpack into $GCC, and you should have GCC binaries in $GCC/bin/

Ubuntu 20.04 LTS: You can ignore this section. GCC is up-to-date.

ls $GCC/bin/
# Sample output:
# cpp     gcc-ranlib  x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-gcc        x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-gcc-ranlib
# gcc     gcov        x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-gcc-9.0.0
# gcc-ar  gcov-dump   x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-gcc-ar
# gcc-nm  gcov-tool   x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-gcc-nm

See This Guide

---

REFERENCES

• https://github.com/google/syzkaller/blob/master/docs/linux/setup.md

• https://github.com/google/syzkaller

• https://blog.cloudflare.com/a-gentle-introduction-to-linux-kernel-fuzzing/

• https://hackmag.com/security/linux-fuzzing/

• https://youtu.be/gTISW-5Uy6I?t=4220

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amEMG63ebQM&ab_channel=AndreyKonovalov