Uncovering Gaps Between RFC Updates and TCP/IP Implementations: LLM-Facilitated Differential Checks on Intermediate Representations

TL;DR

This paper introduces an automated framework leveraging large language models and differential analysis to detect inconsistencies between RFC standards and TCP/IP implementations, aiming to identify vulnerabilities and improve protocol compliance.

Contribution

The study presents a novel LLM-based differential checking framework that automates inconsistency detection between RFC documents and TCP/IP code implementations.

Findings

Effective identification of protocol implementation inconsistencies.

Demonstrated vulnerability detection through differential analysis.

Validated framework's scalability and accuracy.

Abstract

As the core of the Internet infrastructure, the TCP/IP protocol stack undertakes the task of network data transmission. However, due to the complexity of the protocol and the uncertainty of cross-layer interaction, there are often inconsistencies between the implementation of the protocol stack code and the RFC standard. This inconsistency may not only lead to differences in protocol functions but also cause serious security vulnerabilities. At present, with the continuous expansion of protocol stack functions and the rapid iteration of RFC documents, it is increasingly important to detect and fix these inconsistencies. With the rise of large language models, researchers have begun to explore how to extract protocol specifications from RFC documents through these models, including protocol stack modeling, state machine extraction, text ambiguity analysis, and other related content. However, existing methods rely on predefined patterns or rule-based approaches that fail to generalize across different protocol specifications. Automated and scalable detection of these inconsistencies remains a significant challenge. In this study, we propose an automated analysis framework based on LLM and differential models. By modeling the iterative relationship of the protocol and based on the iterative update relationship of the RFC standard, we perform incremental code function analysis on different versions of kernel code implementations to automatically perform code detection and vulnerability analysis. We conduct extensive evaluations to validate the effectiveness of our framework, demonstrating its effectiveness in identifying potential vulnerabilities caused by RFC code inconsistencies.