There are a lot of security issues with dealing with untrusted disk images especially since for historical reasons a lot of the code used to parse filesystems sits in the kernel. Libguestfs avoids these by wrapping the kernel code inside a VM (and that VM inside an sVirt container if you’re using Fedora or RHEL).
However the library side of things could still be vulnerable, especially complicated operations like inspection. Last week we found several vulnerabilities in inspection which could allow an untrusted guest to perform a denial of service attack on a host.
The first vulnerability was identified by Coverity. The second was found by Olaf Hering by looking at similar code paths.
This made me wonder if we could find more inspection bugs semi-automatically. To do this I’ve written an inspection fuzz tester.
The idea is we run inspection on an empty disk image. Normally this wouldn’t find any operating systems. But we intercept certain libguestfs calls (which happen as a side-effect of inspection) and use them to create fake operating system files on the fly.
To give you an example: Inspection might look for a file called /etc/redhat-release and then try to parse it. To do this it will first test if the file exists (guestfs_is_file ("/etc/redhat-release")) and if it does read it. In the empty disk this file won’t exist, but we capture the is_file call, randomly create a file, and then see what happens when inspection tries to parse it.
Libguestfs has a trace mechanism but if we decided to do this sort of thing regularly we’d probably want to add a cleaner way to find the arguments and perhaps even replace the return value from a method call.
The result is a fuzz tester which now runs as part of the ordinary test suite.
I also ran many tens of thousands of iterations over the weekend. The test found Olaf Hering’s bug, which is encouraging, but it didn’t find any other bugs, which means there is room for refinement of the test. In particular I think we could push more malformed registry hives at the inspection code to see what it does.
