| Description |
The basic idea is fairly simple. As 'fuzz testing' suggests, we call syscalls at random, with random arguments. Not an original idea, and one that has been done many times before on Linux, and on other operating systems. Where Trinity differs is that the arguments it passes are not purely random. We found some bugs in the past by just passing random values, but once the *really* dumb bugs were found, these dumb fuzzers would just run and run. The problem was if a syscall took for example a file descriptor as an argument, one of the first things it would try to do was validate that fd. Being garbage, the kernel would just reject it as -EINVAL of course. So on startup, Trinity creates a list of file descriptors, by opening pipes, scanning sysfs, procfs, /dev, and creates a bunch of sockets using random network protocols. Then when a syscall needs an fd, it gets passed one of these at random. File descriptors aren't the only thing Trinity knows about. Every syscall has its arguments annotated, and where possible it tries to provide something at least semi-sensible. "Length" arguments for example get passed one of a whole bunch of potentially interesting values. (Powers of 2 +/-1 are a good choice for triggering off-by-one bugs it seems). Trinity also shares those file descriptors between multiple threads, which causes havoc sometimes. If a child process successfully creates an mmap, the pointer is stored, and fed to subsequent syscalls, sometimes with hilarious results. Trinity supports Alpha, Aarch64, ARM, i386, IA-64, MIPS, PowerPC-64, S390, S390x, SPARC-64, x86-64. Adding support for additional architectures is a small amount of work mostly involving just defining the order of the syscall table. See Documentation/HACKING for details. |