GSoC 2020: Report-2: Fuzzing the NetBSD Network Stack in a Rumpkernel Environment

This report was written by Nisarg S. Joshi as part of Google Summer of Code 2020.

The objective of this project is to fuzz the various protocols and layers of the network stack of NetBSD using rumpkernel. This project is being carried out as a part of GSoC 2020. This blog post is regarding the project, the concepts and tools involved, the objectives and the current progress and next steps.

You can read the previous post/report here.

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GSoC Reports: Benchmarking NetBSD, second evaluation report

This report was written by Apurva Nandan as part of Google Summer of Code 2020.

This blog post is in continuation of GSoC Reports: Benchmarking NetBSD, first evaluation report blog and describes my progress in the second phase of GSoC 2020 under The NetBSD Foundation.

In this phase, I worked on the automation of the regression suite made using Phoronix Test Suite (PTS) and its integration with Anita.

The automation framework consists of two components Phoromatic server, provided by Phoronix Test Suite in pkgsrc, and Anita, a Python tool for automating NetBSD installation.

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GSoC 2020 Second Evaluation Report: Curses Library Automated Testing

This report was prepared by Naman Jain as a part of Google Summer of Code 2020

My GSoC project under NetBSD involves the development of test framework of curses library. This blog report is second in series of blog reports; you can have a look at the first report. This report would cover the progress made in second coding phase along with providing some insights into the libcurses.

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GSoC Reports: Fuzzing Rumpkernel Syscalls, Part 2

This report was prepared by Aditya Vardhan Padala as a part of Google Summer of Code 2020

I have been working on Fuzzing Rumpkernel Syscalls. This blogpost details the work I have done during my second coding period.

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GSoC Reports: Enhancing Syzkaller support for NetBSD, Part 2

This report was prepared by Ayushi Sharma as a part of Google Summer of Code 2020

As a part of Google summer code 2020, I have been working on Enhance the Syzkaller support for NetBSD. This post summarises the work done in the past month.

For work done in the first coding period, you can take a look at the previous post.

Automation for enhancement

With an aim of increasing the number of syscalls fuzzed, we have decided to automate the addition of descriptions for syscalls as well as ioctl device drivers in a customised way for NetBSD.

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The GNU GDB Debugger and NetBSD (Part 3)

The NetBSD team of developers maintains two copies of GDB:

• One in the base-system with a stack of local patches.
• One in pkgsrc with mostly build fix patches.

The base-system version of GDB (GPLv3) still relies on a set of local patches. I set a goal to reduce the local patches to bare minimum, ideally reaching no local modifications at all.[Read More] [0 comments]

 

GSoC Reports: Benchmarking NetBSD, first evaluation report

This report was written by Apurva Nandan as part of Google Summer of Code 2020.

My GSoC project under NetBSD involves developing an automated regression and performance test framework for NetBSD that offers reproducible benchmarking results with detailed history and logs across various hardware & architectures.

To achieve this performance testing framework, I am using the Phoronix Test Suite (PTS) which is an open-source, cross-platform automated testing/benchmarking software for Linux, Windows and BSD environments. It allows the creation of new tests using simple XML files and shell scripts and integrates with revision control systems for per-commit regression testing.

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GSoC Reports: Enhancing Syzkaller support for NetBSD, Part 1

This report was prepared by Ayushi Sharma as a part of Google Summer of Code 2020

I have been working on the project - Enhance the Syzkaller support for NetBSD, as a part of GSoc’20. Past two months have given me quite an enriching experience, pushing me to comprehend more knowledge on fuzzers. This post would give a peek into the work which has been done so far.

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GSoC Reports: Extending the functionality of NetPGP, Part 1

This report was prepared by Jason High as a part of Google Summer of Code 2020

NetPGP is a library and suite of tools implementing OpenPGP under a BSD license. As part of Google Summer of Code 2020, we are working to extend its functionality and work towards greater parity with similar tools. During the first phase, we have made the following contributions

1. Added the Blowfish block cipher
2. ECDSA key creation
3. ECDSA signature and verification
4. Symmetric file encryption/decryption
5. S2K Iterated+Salt for symmetric encryption

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GSoC Reports: Curses Library Automated Testing, Part 1

This report was prepared by Naman Jain as a part of Google Summer of Code 2020

Introduction

My GSoC project under NetBSD involves the development of test framework of curses library. Automated Test Framework (ATF) was introduced in 2007 but ATF cannot be used directly for curses testing for several reasons most important of them being curses has functions which do timed reads/writes which is hard to do with just piping characters to test applications. Also, stdin is not a tty device and behaves differently and may affect the results. A lot of work regarding this has been done and we have a separate test framework in place for testing curses.

The aim of project is to build a robust test suite for the library and complete the SUSv2 specification. This includes writing tests for the remaining functions and enhancing the existing ones. Meanwhile, the support for complex character function has to be completed along with fixing some bugs, adding features and improving the test framework.

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GSoC Reports: Fuzzing the NetBSD Network Stack in a Rumpkernel Environment, Part 1

This report was prepared by Nisarg Joshi as a part of Google Summer of Code 2020

Introduction:

The objective of this project is to fuzz the various protocols and layers of the network stack of NetBSD using rumpkernel. This project is being carried out as a part of GSoC 2020. This blog post is regarding the project, the concepts and tools involved, the objectives and the current progress and next steps.

Fuzzing:

Fuzzing or fuzz testing is an automated software testing technique in which a program is tested by passing unusual, unexpected or semi-random input generated data to the input of the program and repeatedly doing so, trying to crash the program and detect potential bugs or undealt corner cases.

There are several tools available today that enable this which are known as fuzzers. An effective fuzzer generates semi-valid inputs that are "valid enough" in that they are not directly rejected by the parser, but do create unexpected behaviors deeper in the program and are "invalid enough" to expose corner cases that have not been properly dealt with. 

Fuzzers can be of various types like dumb vs smart, generation-based vs mutation-based and so on. A dumb fuzzer generates random input without looking at the input format or model but it can follow some sophisticated algorithms like in AFL, though considered a dumb fuzzer as it just flips bits and replaces bytes, still uses a genetic algorithm to create new test cases, where as a smart fuzzer will follow an input model to generate semi-random data that can penetrate well in the code and trigger more edge cases. Mutation and generation fuzzers handle test case generation differently. Mutation fuzzers mutate a supplied seed input object, while generation fuzzers generate new test cases from a supplied model.

Some examples of popular fuzzers are: AFL(American Fuzzy Lop), Syzkaller, Honggfuzz.

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GSoC Reports: Make system(3) and popen(3) use posix_spawn(3) internally, Part 1

This report was prepared by Nikita Ronja Gillmann as a part of Google Summer of Code 2020

This is my first report for the Google Summer of Code project I am working on for NetBSD.

Prior work: In GSoC 2012 Charles Zhang added the posix_spawn syscall which according to its SF repository at the time (maybe even now, I have not looked very much into comparing all other systems and libcs + kernels) is an in-kernel implementation of posix_spawn which provides performance benefits compared to FreeBSD and other systems which had a userspace implementation (in 2012).

After 1 week of reading POSIX and writing code, 2 weeks of coding and another 1.5 weeks of bugfixes I have successfully implemented posix_spawn in usage in system(3) and popen(3) internally.

The biggest challenge for me was to understand POSIX, to read the standard. I am used to reading more formal books, but I can't remember working with the posix standard directly before.

The next part of my Google Summer of Code project will focus on similar rewrites of NetBSD's sh(1).

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