Progressive Scrutiny: Incremental Detection of UBI bugs in the Linux Kernel
Yizhuo Zhai, Hao Yu, Zheng Zhang, Weiteng Chen, Guoren Li, Zhiyun Qian, Chengyu Song, Manu Sridharan, Srikanth V. Krishnamurthy, Trent Jaeger, Paul K. L. Yu
Abstract
The Linux kernel has a rapid development cycle, with 10 commits every hour, on average. While these updates provide new features and bug fixes, they can also introduce new bugs and security vulnerabilities. Recent techniques showed how to detect some types of vulnerabilities using static analysis, but these tools cannot run quickly enough to keep up with the pace of kernel development. Ideally, an incremental analysis technique could address this problem, by doing a complete analysis once and then only analyzing changed portions of the code subsequently. However, incremental analysis of the Linux kernel poses unique challenges, due to its enormous scale and the high precision required to reduce false positives.