KernelGPT: Enhanced Kernel Fuzzing via Large Language Models

Bugs in operating system kernels can affect billions of devices and users all over the world. As a result, a large body of research has been focused on kernel fuzzing, i.e., automatically generating syscall (system call) sequences to detect potential kernel bugs or vulnerabilities. Kernel fuzzing aims to generate valid syscall sequences guided by syscall specifications that define both the syntax and semantics of syscalls. While there has been existing work trying to automate syscall specification generation, this remains largely manual work, and a large number of important syscalls are still uncovered.

In this paper, we propose KernelGPT, the first approach to automatically synthesizing syscall specifications via Large Language Models (LLMs) for enhanced kernel fuzzing. Our key insight is that LLMs have seen massive kernel code, documentation, and use cases during pre-training, and thus can automatically distill the necessary information for making valid syscalls. More specifically, KernelGPT leverages an iterative approach to automatically infer the specifications, and further debug and repair them based on the validation feedback. Our results demonstrate that KernelGPT can generate more new and valid specifications and achieve higher coverage than state-of-the-art techniques. So far, by using newly generated specifications, KernelGPT has already detected 24 new unique bugs in Linux kernel, with 12 fixed and 11 assigned with CVE numbers. Moreover, a number of specifications generated by KernelGPT have already been merged into the kernel fuzzer Syzkaller, following the request from its development team.

• Security and privacy → Operating systems security; • Software and its engineering → Software testing and debugging.