Papers › KernelGPT: Enhanced Kernel Fuzzing via Large Language Models

KernelGPT: Enhanced Kernel Fuzzing via Large Language Models

31 Dec 2023arXiv:2401.00563archive 2025-07-28

Chenyuan Yang, Zijie Zhao, Lingming Zhang

Bugs in operating system kernels can affect billions of devices and users all over the world. As a result, a large body of research has been focused on kernel fuzzing, i.e., automatically generating syscall (system call) sequences to detect potential kernel bugs or vulnerabilities. Kernel fuzzing aims to generate valid syscall sequences guided by syscall specifications that define both the syntax and semantics of syscalls. While there has been existing work trying to automate syscall specification generation, this remains largely manual work, and a large number of important syscalls are still uncovered. In this paper, we propose KernelGPT, the first approach to automatically synthesizing syscall specifications via Large Language Models (LLMs) for enhanced kernel fuzzing. Our key insight is that LLMs have seen massive kernel code, documentation, and use cases during pre-training, and thus can automatically distill the necessary information for making valid syscalls. More specifically, KernelGPT leverages an iterative approach to automatically infer the specifications, and further debug and repair them based on the validation feedback. Our results demonstrate that KernelGPT can generate more new and valid specifications and achieve higher coverage than state-of-the-art techniques. So far, by using newly generated specifications, KernelGPT has already detected 24 new unique bugs in Linux kernel, with 12 fixed and 11 assigned with CVE numbers. Moreover, a number of specifications generated by KernelGPT have already been merged into the kernel fuzzer Syzkaller, following the request from its development team.

Code

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

17 samples harvested; 9 ran; 0 honoured the contract we drafted; 8 have no recorded run. Read from Syntology's graph 2026-09-24; that is when this build read the record, not when the samples ran.

Licence: 0 of the 17 samples are pointer only, meaning Syntology does not serve that copy's text. This page shows no code text for any sample; each one links to its file in the repository.

Harvested from ise-uiuc/kernelgpt. “Ran” means the sample executed on a synthesized input. It does not mean the output is correct, and nothing here reproduces the paper's results. “Honoured” and “violated” refer to a contract Syntology drafted from the code itself; “our draft was wrong” and “fixture could not drive it” are failures of Syntology's instrument, not of the code.

Each sample ends with its code_sha256, Syntology's identity for that exact code. An agent fetches the stored sample with Syntology's MCP tool get_code(code_sha256="…") (how to connect); click an identity to copy that call.

Repository labels, per sample. official repository: The archive marks this repository official for the paper. named in the paper: The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official. community (archive-listed): In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper. found in paper text by Syntology: Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted. community: Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested. Samples from a repository marked official are listed first. Licence labels name the repository's licence as recorded at harvest. “Pointer only” means Syntology does not serve that copy's text, for one of four reasons: no licence file was found; the licence was not identified; the licence is recorded as permissive but that copy's record is not marked cleared; or the licence is outside the permissive list Syntology serves text under (MIT, Apache-2.0, BSD and similar). Some licences outside that list permit redistribution, such as WTFPL, and GPL-3.0 under its conditions; they are simply not on the list. Hover a licence label for the reason. File links open the file on GitHub at the default branch, which may have changed since the harvest.

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections