eBPF Misbehavior Detection: Fuzzing with a Specification-Based Oracle

Bugs in the Linux eBPF verifier may cause it to mistakenly accept unsafe eBPF programs or reject safe ones, causing either security or usability issues. While prior works on fuzzing the eBPF verifier have been effective, their bug oracles only hint at the existence of bugs indirectly (e.g., when a memory error occurs in downstream execution) instead of showing the root cause, confining them to uncover a narrow range of security bugs only with no detection of usability issues.

In this paper, we propose SpecCheck, a specification-based oracle integrated with our fuzzer Veritas, to detect a wide range of bugs in the eBPF verifier. SpecCheck encodes eBPF instruction semantics and safety properties as a specification and turns the claim of whether a concrete eBPF program is safe into checking the satisfiability of the corresponding safety constraints, which can be reasoned automatically without abstraction. The output from the oracle will be crosschecked with the eBPF verifier for any discrepancies. Using SpecCheck, Veritas uncovered 13 bugs in the Linux eBPF verifier, including severe bugs that can cause privilege escalation or information leakage, as well as bugs that cause frustration in even experienced kernel developers.