Usually when an attacker exploits a vulnerability, the attack starts out as a Illegal memory access or Control flow hijack, which the attacker would use to write to sensitive memory locations or execute arbitrary code in supervisor mode, to try to increase privileges in the system. Illegal memory accesses are memory accesses which the programmer didn’t intend to happen, which allows attackers to read or write to some memory locations. Illegal memory accesses can be classified on three aspects:

Syzbot is an automated fuzzing infrastructure that uses Syzkaller to perform continuous fuzzing, primarily on the Linux kernel. Whenever it finds bugs, Syzbot reports it to the relevant mailing list. It also has a public dashboard where it lists all the open bugs that needs to be fixed. Syzbot is quite effective in finding bugs in the kernel but due to the large number of bugs being found, many of them don’t get fixed in time.

Coccinelle is static analysis tool used for semantic pattern matching and automated transformation of C programs. It is written in OCaml. Unlike other pattern matching tools like grep which use regular expressions, Coccinelle understands C syntax and can find semantic code pattern in the source code and automatically transform them, irrespective of the name of identifiers, comments or formatting. Coccinelle is intraprocedural, i.e. all its matching and transformation happens within functions.

Syzkaller is an unsupervised, grammar based, coverage guided fuzzer used for fuzzing operating system kernels. It primarily performs system call fuzzing, but it can also be used for fuzzing USB and network packets. It is currently used for continuous fuzzing of Linux, Android and other BSD kernels. Automated: Syzkaller can automatically restart crashed virtual machines and also create a reproducer for the crashes. Coverage guided: Syzkaller gets coverage information using the KCOV infrastructure, which is built into the kernel.

Disclaimer: I’m no expert in this. This post is just to collect all my thoughts and lessons learnt from random talks and blogs, about research. What is research? Research is producing new knowledge. The aim of research is to do something novel (new) and useful. The purpose of literature survey is to ensure that whatever idea we come up with is new and has not been proposed before. And the purpose of evaluations is to show that our idea or technique is useful.