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  4. eBPF Misbehavior Detection: Fuzzing with a Specification-Based Oracle
 
conference paper

eBPF Misbehavior Detection: Fuzzing with a Specification-Based Oracle

Lyu, Tao  
•
Dwivedi, Kumar Kartikeya  
•
Bourgeat, Thomas  
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October 12, 2025
Proceedings of the ACM SIGOPS 31st Symposium on Operating Systems Principles
ACM SIGOPS 31st Symposium on Operating Systems Principles

Bugs in the Linux eBPF verifier may cause it to mistakenly accept unsafe eBPF programs or reject safe ones, causing either security or usability issues. While prior works on fuzzing the eBPF verifier have been effective, their bug oracles only hint at the existence of bugs indirectly (e.g., when a memory error occurs in downstream execution) instead of showing the root cause, confining them to uncover a narrow range of security bugs only with no detection of usability issues. In this paper, we propose SpecCheck, a specification-based oracle integrated with our fuzzer Veritas, to detect a wide range of bugs in the eBPF verifier. SpecCheck encodes eBPF instruction semantics and safety properties as a specification and turns the claim of whether a concrete eBPF program is safe into checking the satisfiability of the corresponding safety constraints, which can be reasoned automatically without abstraction. The output from the oracle will be crosschecked with the eBPF verifier for any discrepancies. Using SpecCheck, Veritas uncovered 13 bugs in the Linux eBPF verifier, including severe bugs that can cause privilege escalation or information leakage, as well as bugs that cause frustration in even experienced kernel developers.

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Type
conference paper
DOI
10.1145/3731569.3764797
Author(s)
Lyu, Tao  

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

Dwivedi, Kumar Kartikeya  

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

Bourgeat, Thomas  

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

Payer, Mathias  

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

Xu, Meng

University of Waterloo

Kashyap, Sanidhya  

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

Date Issued

2025-10-12

Publisher

ACM

Publisher place

New York, NY, USA

Published in
Proceedings of the ACM SIGOPS 31st Symposium on Operating Systems Principles
ISBN of the book

979-8-4007-1870-0

Start page

701

End page

718

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
RS3LAB  
VCA  
HEXHIVE  
Event nameEvent acronymEvent placeEvent date
ACM SIGOPS 31st Symposium on Operating Systems Principles

SOSP '25

Seoul, Republic of Korea

2025-10-13 - 2025-10-16

FunderFunding(s)Grant NumberGrant URL

The European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program

850868

NSERC

RGPIN-2022-03325

NCC

2024-1488

Available on Infoscience
October 8, 2025
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/254797
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