Finding Bugs in File Systems with an Extensible Fuzzing Framework

Abstract

File systems are too large to be bug free. Although handwritten test suites have been widely used to stress file systems, they can hardly keep up with the rapid increase in file system size and complexity, leading to new bugs being introduced. These bugs come in various flavors: buffer overflows to complicated semantic bugs. Although bug-specific checkers exist, they generally lack a way to explore file system states thoroughly. More importantly, no turnkey solution exists that unifies the checking effort of various aspects of a file system under one umbrella. In this article, to highlight the potential of applying fuzzing to find any type of file system bugs in a generic way, we propose Hydra, an extensible fuzzing framework. Hydra provides building blocks for file system fuzzing, including input mutators, feedback engines, test executors, and bug post-processors. As a result, developers only need to focus on building the core logic for finding bugs of their interests. We showcase the effectiveness of Hydra with four checkers that hunt crash inconsistency, POSIX violations, logic assertion failures, and memory errors. So far, Hydra has discovered 157 new bugs in Linux file systems, including three in verified file systems (FSCQ and Yxv6).