Dongliang Mu (Huazhong University of Science and Technology), Yuhang Wu (Pennsylvania State University), Yueqi Chen (Pennsylvania State University), Zhenpeng Lin (Pennsylvania State University), Chensheng Yu (George Washington University), Xinyu Xing (Pennsylvania State University), Gang Wang (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

In the past three years, the continuous fuzzing projects Syzkaller and Syzbot have achieved great success in detecting kernel vulnerabilities, finding more kernel bugs than those found in the past 20 years. However, a side effect of continuous fuzzing is that it generates an excessive number of
crash reports, many of which are “duplicated” reports caused by the same bug. While Syzbot uses a simple heuristic to group (deduplicate) reports, we find that it is often inaccurate. In this
paper, we empirically analyze the duplicated kernel bug reports to understand: (1) the prevalence of duplication; (2) the potential costs introduced by duplication; and (3) the key causes behind the duplication problem. We collected all of the fixed kernel bugs from September 2017 to November 2020, including 3.24 million crash reports grouped by Syzbot under 2,526 bug reports (identified by unique bug titles). We found the bug reports indeed had duplication: 47.1% of the 2,526 bug reports are duplicated with one or more other reports. By analyzing the metadata of these reports, we found undetected duplication introduced extra costs in terms of time and developer efforts. Then we organized Linux kernel experts to analyze a sample of duplicated bugs (375 bug reports, unique 120 bugs) and identified 6 key contributing factors to the duplication. Based on these empirical findings, we proposed and prototyped actionable strategies for bug deduplication. After confirming their effectiveness using a ground-truth dataset, we further applied our methods and identified previously unknown duplication cases among open bugs.

View More Papers

EMS: History-Driven Mutation for Coverage-based Fuzzing

Chenyang Lyu (Zhejiang University), Shouling Ji (Zhejiang University), Xuhong Zhang (Zhejiang University & Zhejiang University NGICS Platform), Hong Liang (Zhejiang University), Binbin Zhao (Georgia Institute of Technology), Kangjie Lu (University of Minnesota), Raheem Beyah (Georgia Institute of Technology)

Read More

Preventing Kernel Hacks with HAKCs

Derrick McKee (Purdue University), Yianni Giannaris (MIT CSAIL), Carolina Ortega (MIT CSAIL), Howard Shrobe (MIT CSAIL), Mathias Payer (EPFL), Hamed Okhravi (MIT Lincoln Laboratory), Nathan Burow (MIT Lincoln Laboratory)

Read More

Get a Model! Model Hijacking Attack Against Machine Learning...

Ahmed Salem (CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security), Michael Backes (CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security), Yang Zhang (CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security)

Read More

Fuzzing Configurations of Program Options

Zenong Zhang (University of Texas at Dallas), George Klees (University of Maryland), Eric Wang (Poolesville High School), Michael Hicks (University of Maryland), Shiyi Wei (University of Texas at Dallas)

Read More