RLTrace: Synthesizing High-Quality System Call Traces for OS Fuzz Testing

TL;DR

RLTrace employs deep reinforcement learning to generate diverse, high-quality system call traces that enhance OS fuzz testing effectiveness, uncovering new kernel vulnerabilities and improving code coverage.

Contribution

This paper introduces RLTrace, a novel deep reinforcement learning approach for synthesizing system call traces that surpass traditional methods in diversity and coverage.

Findings

RLTrace produces more comprehensive system call traces than existing methods.

Feeding RLTrace-generated traces to SYZKALLER improves Linux kernel code coverage.

RLTrace discovered a previously unknown Linux kernel vulnerability.

Abstract

Securing operating system (OS) kernel is one central challenge in today's cyber security landscape. The cutting-edge testing technique of OS kernel is software fuzz testing. By mutating the program inputs with random variations for iterations, fuzz testing aims to trigger program crashes and hangs caused by potential bugs that can be abused by the inputs. To achieve high OS code coverage, the de facto OS fuzzer typically composes system call traces as the input seed to mutate and to interact with OS kernels. Hence, quality and diversity of the employed system call traces become the prominent factor to decide the effectiveness of OS fuzzing. However, these system call traces to date are generated with hand-coded rules, or by analyzing system call logs of OS utility programs. Our observation shows that such system call traces can only subsume common usage scenarios of OS system calls, and likely omit hidden bugs. In this research, we propose a deep reinforcement learning-based solution, called RLTrace, to synthesize diverse and comprehensive system call traces as the seed to fuzz OS kernels. During model training, the deep learning model interacts with OS kernels and infers optimal system call traces w.r.t. our learning goal -- maximizing kernel code coverage. Our evaluation shows that RLTrace outperforms other seed generators by producing more comprehensive system call traces, subsuming system call corner usage cases and subtle dependencies. By feeding the de facto OS fuzzer, SYZKALLER, with system call traces synthesized by RLTrace, we show that SYZKALLER can achieve higher code coverage for testing Linux kernels. Furthermore, RLTrace found one vulnerability in the Linux kernel (version 5.5-rc6), which is publicly unknown to the best of our knowledge by the time of writing.