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Syscall descriptions

syzkaller uses declarative description of syscall interfaces to manipulate programs (sequences of syscalls). Below you can see (hopefully self-explanatory) excerpt from the descriptions:

open(file filename, flags flags[open_flags], mode flags[open_mode]) fd
read(fd fd, buf buffer[out], count len[buf])
close(fd fd)
open_mode = S_IRUSR, S_IWUSR, S_IXUSR, S_IRGRP, S_IWGRP, S_IXGRP, S_IROTH, S_IWOTH, S_IXOTH

The descriptions are contained in sys/$OS/*.txt files. For example see the sys/linux/dev_snd_midi.txt file for descriptions of the Linux MIDI interfaces.

A more formal description of the description syntax can be found here.

Programs

The translated descriptions are then used to generate, mutate, execute, minimize, serialize and deserialize programs. A program is a sequences of syscalls with concrete values for arguments. Here is an example (of a textual representation) of a program:

r0 = open(&(0x7f0000000000)="./file0", 0x3, 0x9)
read(r0, &(0x7f0000000000), 42)
close(r0)

For actual manipulations syzkaller uses in-memory AST-like representation consisting of Call and Arg values defined in prog/prog.go. That representation is used to analyze, generate, mutate, minimize, validate, etc programs.

The in-memory representation can be transformed to/from textual form to store in on-disk corpus, show to humans, etc.

There is also another binary representation of the programs (called exec), that is much simpler, does not contains rich type information (irreversible) and is used for actual execution (interpretation) of programs by executor.

Describing new system calls

This section describes how to extend syzkaller to allow fuzz testing of more kernel interfaces. This is particularly useful for kernel developers who are proposing new system calls.

Currently all syscall descriptions are manually-written. There is an open issue to provide some aid for this process and some ongoing work, but we are not there yet to have a fully-automated way to generate descriptions. There is a helper headerparser utility that can auto-generate some parts of descriptions from header files.

To enable fuzzing of a new kernel interface:

  1. Study the interface, find out which syscalls are required to use it.

  2. Using syntax documentation and existing descriptions as an example, add a declarative description of this interface to the appropriate file:

    • sys/linux/<subsystem>.txt files hold system calls for particular kernel subsystems, for example bpf.txt or socket.txt.
    • sys/linux/sys.txt holds descriptions for more general system calls.
    • An entirely new subsystem can be added as a new sys/linux/<new>.txt file.
    • Use dev_*.txt filename format for descriptions of /dev/ devices.
    • Similarly, use socket_*.txt for sockets.

  3. After adding/changing descriptions run:

    make extract TARGETOS=linux SOURCEDIR=$KSRC
make generate
make

  4. Run syzkaller. Make sure that the newly added interface in being reached by syzkaller using the coverage information page.

In the instructions above make extract generates/updates the *.const files. $KSRC should point to the latest kernel checkout.
Note: for Linux the latest kernel checkout generally means the mainline tree.
However, in some cases we add descriptions for interfaces that are not in the mainline tree yet, so if make extract complains about missing header files or constants undefined on all architectures, try to use the latest linux-next tree (or if it happens to be broken at the moment, try a slightly older linux-next tree).
Note: make extract overwrites .config in $KSRC and mrproper's it. Note: *.const files are checked-in with the *.txt changes in the same commit.

Then make generate updates generated code and make rebuilds binaries.
Note: make generate does not require any kernel sources, native compilers, etc and is pure text processing. Note: make generate also updates the SYZ_REVISION under executor/defs.h, which is required for machine check while running syz-manager. This should be taken care of especially if you are trying to rebase with your own change on syscall description.

Note: make extract extracts constants for all architectures which requires installed cross-compilers. If you get errors about missing compilers/libraries, try sudo make install_prerequisites or install equivalent package for your distro. Note: sudo make install_prerequisites will success even with some package failed to install, sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade might be required to make this more efficient.

If you want to fuzz only the new subsystem that you described locally, you may find the enable_syscalls configuration parameter useful to specifically target the new system calls.

When updating existing syzkaller descriptions, note, that unless there's a drastic change in descriptions for a particular syscall, the programs that are already in the corpus will be kept there, unless you manually clear them out (for example by removing the corpus.db file).

Description compilation internals

The process of compiling the textual syscall descriptions into machine-usable form used by syzkaller to actually generate programs consists of 2 steps.

The first step is extraction of values of symbolic constants from kernel sources using syz-extract utility. syz-extract generates a small C program that includes kernel headers referenced by include directives, defines macros as specified by define directives and prints values of symbolic constants. Results are stored in .const files, one per arch. For example, sys/linux/dev_ptmx.txt is translated into sys/linux/dev_ptmx_amd64.const.

The second step is translation of descriptions into Go code using syz-sysgen utility (the actual compiler code lives in pkg/ast and pkg/compiler). This step uses syscall descriptions and the const files generated during the first step and produces instantiations of Syscall and Type types defined in prog/types.go. You can see an example of the compiler output for Akaros in sys/akaros/gen/amd64.go. This step also generates some minimal syscall metadata for C++ code in executor/syscalls.h.

Non-mainline subsystems

make extract extracts constants for all *.txt files and for all supported architectures. This may not work for subsystems that are not present in mainline kernel or if you have problems with native kernel compilers, etc. In such cases the syz-extract utility used by make extract can be run manually for single file/arch as:

make bin/syz-extract
bin/syz-extract -os linux -arch $ARCH -sourcedir $KSRC -builddir $LINUXBLD <new>.txt
make generate
make

$ARCH is one of amd64, 386 arm64, arm, ppc64le, mips64le. If the subsystem is supported on several architectures, then run syz-extract for each arch. $LINUX should point to kernel source checkout, which is configured for the corresponding arch (i.e. you need to run make ARCH=arch someconfig && make ARCH=arch there first, remember to add CROSS_COMPILE=arm-linux-gnueabi-/aarch64-linux-gnu-/powerpc64le-linux-gnu- if needed). If the kernel was built into a separate directory (with make O=output_dir, remember to put .config into output_dir, this will be helpful if you'd like to work on different arch at the same time) then also set $LINUXBLD to the location of the build directory.