GSoC 2018 Reports: Integrate libFuzzer with the Basesystem, Part 3

Prepared by Yang Zheng (tomsun.0.7 AT Gmail DOT com) as part of GSoC 2018

This is the final report of the project of integrating libFuzzer for the userland applications, here are the former two parts of this project:

• GSoC 2018 Reports: Integrate libFuzzer with the Basesystem, Part 1
• GSoC 2018 Reports: Integrate libFuzzer with the Basesystem, Part 2

For the last month of GSoC 2018, there two kinds of contributions:

• Fuzzed some functions (instead of the whole program) from libraries and applications
• Honggfuzz related work

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Introduction to µUBSan - a clean-room reimplementation of the Undefined Behavior Sanitizer runtime

Sanitization is a process of detecting potential issues during the execution process. Sanitizers instrument (embedding checks into the generated code) and interact with the runtime linked into an executable, either statically or dynamically. In the past month, I've finished a functional support of MKSANITIZER with Address Sanitizer and Undefined Behavior Sanitizer. MKSANITIZER uses the default compiler runtime shipped with Clang and GCC and ported to NetBSD.

Over the past month, I've implemented from scratch a clean-room version of the UBSan runtime. The initial motivation was the need of developing one for the purposes of catching undefined behavior reports (unspecified code semantics in a compiled executable) in the NetBSD kernel. However, since we need to write a new runtime, I've decided to go two steps further and design code that will be usable inside libc and as a standalone library (linked .c source code) for the use of ATF regression tests.[Read More] [0 comments]

 

Changes to NetBSD release support policy

The NetBSD release engineering team is announcing a new support policy for our release branches. This affects NetBSD 8.0 and subsequent major releases (9.0, 10.0, etc.). All currently supported releases (6.x and 7.x) will keep their existing support policies.

Beginning with NetBSD 8.0, there will be no more teeny branches (e.g., netbsd-8-0).

This means that netbsd-8 will be the only branch for 8.x and there will be only one category of releases derived from 8.0: update releases. The first update release after 8.0 will be 8.1, the next will be 8.2, and so on. Update releases will contain security and bug fixes, and may contain new features and enhancements that are deemed safe for the release branch.

With this simplification of our support policy, users can expect:

• More frequent releases
• Better long-term support (example: quicker fixes for security issues, since there is only one branch to fix per major release)
• New features and enhancements to make their way to binary releases faster (under our current scheme, no major release has received more than two feature updates in its life)

We understand that users of teeny branches may be concerned about the increased number of changes that update releases will bring. Historically, NetBSD stable branches (e.g., netbsd-7) have been managed very conservatively. Under this new scheme, the release engineering team will be even more strict in what changes we allow on the stable branch. Changes that would create issues with backwards compatibility are not allowed, and any changes made that prove to be problematic will be promptly reverted.

The support policy we've had until now was nice in theory, but it has not worked out in practice. We believe that this change will benefit the situation for vast majority of NetBSD users.

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NetBSD 8.0 released

The NetBSD 8.0 release is available now.

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GSoC 2018 Reports: Configuration files versioning in pkgsrc, Part 1

Starting with this post I will describe how, as part of the Google Summer of Code 2018, support for configuration files versioning is shaping up in pkgsrc.

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Report from pkgsrcCon 2018

On July 7th and 8th there was pkgsrcCon 2018 in Berlin, Germany. It was my first pkgsrcCon and it was really really nice... So, let's share a report about it, what we have done, the talk presented and everything else!

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GSoC 2018 Reports: Integrate libFuzzer with the Basesystem, Part 2

Prepared by Yang Zheng (tomsun.0.7 AT Gmail DOT com) as part of GSoC 2018

This is the second part of the project of integrating libFuzzer for the userland applications, you can learn about the first part of this project in this post.

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GSoC 2018 report: Kernel Address Sanitizer, Part 2

Prepared by Siddharth Muralee (@Tr3x__) as a part of GSoC'18

I have been working on porting the Kernel Address Sanitizer(KASAN) for the NetBSD kernel. This summarizes the work done until the second evaluation.

Refer here for the link to the first report.

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NetBSD 8.0 Release Candidate 2

The second (and hopefully final) release candidate for NetBSD 8.0 is available now.

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MKSANITIZER - bug detector software integration with the NetBSD userland

I've finished the integration of sanitizers with the distribution build framework. A bootable and installable distribution is now available, verified with Address Sanitizer, with Undefined Behavior Sanitizer, or with both concurrently. A few dozen bugs were detected and the majority of them addressed.

LLVM sanitizers are compiler features that help find common software bugs. The following sanitizers are available:

• TSan: Finds threading bugs,
• MSan: Finds uninitialized memory read,
• ASan: Finds invalid address usage bugs,
• UBSan: Finds unspecified code semantics in runtime.

The new MKSANITIZER option supports full coverage of the NetBSD code base with these sanitizers, which helps reduce bugs and serve high security demands.[Read More] [1 comment]

 

GSoC 2018 Reports: Kernel Undefined Behavior Sanitizer, Part 1

Prepared by Harry Pantazis(IRC:luserx0, Mail:luserx0 AT gmail DOT com) as part of GSoC 2018.

For GSoC '18, I'm working on the Kernel Undefined Behavior Sanitizer (KUBSAN) project for the integration of Undefined Behavior regression testing on the amd64 kernel. This article summarizes what has been done up to this point (Phase 1 Evaluation), future goals and a brief introduction to Undefined Behavior.[Read More] [0 comments]

 

GSoC 2018 Reports: Kernel Address Sanitizer, Part 1

Prepared by Siddharth Muralee (@Tr3x__) as part of GSoC 2018.

It's been a fun couple of weeks since I started working on the Kernel Address Sanitizer (KASan) project with NetBSD. I have learned a lot during this period. It's been pretty amazing. This is a report on the work I have done prior to the first evaluation period.[Read More] [0 comments]