Journal of Computer Science and Technology ›› 2021, Vol. 36 ›› Issue (6): 1325-1341.doi: 10.1007/s11390-021-1666-4

Special Issue: Software Systems

• Special Section on Software Systems 2021-Theme: Dependable Software Engineering • Previous Articles     Next Articles

AMCheX: Accurate Analysis of Missing-Check Bugs for Linux Kernel

Ying-Jie Wang, Liang-Ze Yin, Member, CCF, and Wei Dong*, Member, CCF        

  1. Key Laboratory of Software Engineering for Complex Systems, College of Computer Science National University of Defense Technology, Changsha 410073, China
  • Received:2021-06-01 Revised:2021-09-30 Online:2021-11-30 Published:2021-12-01
  • Contact: Wei Dong E-mail:wdong@nudt.edu.cn
  • Supported by:
    This work was supported by the National Nature Science Foundation of China under Grant Nos. 61802415, 62032019 and 62032024.

The Linux kernel adopts a large number of security checks to prevent security-sensitive operations from being executed under unsafe conditions. If a security-sensitive operation is unchecked, a missing-check issue arises. Missing check is a class of severe bugs in software programs especially in operating system kernels, which may cause a variety of security issues, such as out-of-bound accesses, permission bypasses, and privilege escalations. Due to the lack of security specifications, how to automatically identify security-sensitive operations and their required security checks in the Linux kernel becomes a challenge for missing-check analysis. In this paper, we present an accurate missing-check analysis method for Linux kernel, which can automatically infer possible security-sensitive operations. Particularly, we first automatically identify all possible security check functions of Linux. Then according to their callsites, a two-direction analysis method is leveraged to identify possible security-sensitive operations. A missing-check bug is reported when the security-sensitive operation is not protected by its corresponding security check. We have implemented our method as a tool, named AMCheX, on top of the LLVM (Low Level Virtual Machine) framework and evaluated it on the Linux kernel. AMCheX reported 12 new missing-check bugs which can cause security issues. Five of them have been confirmed by Linux maintainers.

Key words: security check function; security-sensitive operation; program analysis; missing-check;

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