KernelRCA: Facilitating Root Cause Analysis of Memory Corruptions in Linux Kernel with Contextual Causality Chain

Continuous fuzzing infrastructure has found a large number of bugs. In this case, automatic root cause analysis (RCA) has been proposed to reduce the expensive manual effort to understand the root cause of a bug. However, existing root-cause representations are designed as isolated forms. Analysts still need to manually infer the integrated bug-triggering procedure including calling context and data dependency, which is very difficult for OS kernels due to their complexity.

In this paper, we propose contextual causality chain (CC-chain), a novel root-cause representation to intuitively reflect the integrated bug-triggering procedure of memory corruptions in the Linux kernel. CC-chain shows the bug-contributing instructions to explain corresponding unexpected behaviors that lead to a bug, as well as calling contexts and data dependencies among these instructions to help analysts rapidly understand how a bug happens. To automatically construct the CC-chain, we design a root cause analysis system KernelRCA including selective tracing, contextual information recovery, and chain-style root cause analysis. KernelRCA successfully diagnoses 54 various kinds of real-world memory corruptions in the Linux kernel and performs better than existing crash reports and KASAN reports. A user study shows that KernelRCA's reports significantly facilitate bug understanding and fixing for human analysts.