Syzbot: Google Continuously Fuzzing The Linux Kernel

On the Linux kernel mailing list over the past week has been a discussion about Syzbot, an effort by Google for continuously fuzzing the mainline Linux kernel and its branches with automatic bug reporting.

Syzbot is the automation bot around Syzkaller, the Google-developed unsupervised kernel fuzzer that has since been extended to support FreeBSD, Fuchsia, NetBSD, and Windows. For those curious how the Syzkaller fuzzer works, it's documented via their GitHub documentation and the main project site. Syzkaller has been heavily developed over the past nearly two years while Syzbot is the more recent effort.

Syzbot as the automation driver for Syzkaller has managed to report around 200 kernel bugs over the past two months. Given the automation, Google developers are working on the process to make handling these fuzzing bug reports most effective and efficient, hence the recent kernel mailing list discussion.

If you are interested in learning more about the Golang-written Syzbot can find it via this GitHub repo. It will be interesting to see how many more bugs Syzbot will be able to uncover in the Linux kernel in 2018 when it's running at full-throttle for a greater length of time.