Xiaochen Zou, Guoren Li, Weiteng Chen, Hang Zhang, and Zhiyun Qian, UC Riverside
Fuzzing has become one of the most effective bug finding approach for software. In recent years, 24*7 continuous fuzzing platforms have emerged to test critical pieces of software, e.g., Linux kernel. Though capable of discovering many bugs and providing reproducers (e.g., proof-of-concepts), a major problem is that they neglect a critical function that should have been built-in, i.e., evaluation of a bug's security impact. It is well-known that the lack of understanding of security impact can lead to delayed bug fixes as well as patch propagation. In this paper, we develop SyzScope, a system that can automatically uncover new "high-risk" impacts given a bug with seemingly "low-risk" impacts. From analyzing over a thousand low-risk bugs on syzbot, SyzScope successfully determined that 183 low-risk bugs (more than 15%) in fact contain high-risk impacts, e.g., control flow hijack and arbitrary memory write, some of which still do not have patches available yet.
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author = {Xiaochen Zou and Guoren Li and Weiteng Chen and Hang Zhang and Zhiyun Qian},
title = {{SyzScope}: Revealing {High-Risk} Security Impacts of {Fuzzer-Exposed} Bugs in Linux kernel},
booktitle = {31st USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 22)},
year = {2022},
isbn = {978-1-939133-31-1},
address = {Boston, MA},
pages = {3201--3217},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity22/presentation/zou},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = aug
}