Package trinity: Information

Trinity makes syscalls at random, with random arguments.  Where Trinity
differs from other fuzz testers is that the arguments it passes are not
purely random.

We found some bugs in the past by just passing random values, but once
the really dumb bugs were found, these dumb fuzzers would just run and
run.  The problem was if a syscall took for example a file descriptor as
an argument, one of the first things it would try to do was validate
that fd.  Being garbage, the kernel would just reject it as -EINVAL of
course.  So on startup, Trinity creates a list of file descriptors, by
opening pipes, scanning sysfs, procfs, /dev, and creates a bunch of
sockets using random network protocols.  Then when a syscall needs an
fd, it gets passed one of these at random.

File descriptors aren't the only thing Trinity knows about.  Every
syscall has its arguments annotated, and where possible it tries to
provide something at least semi-sensible. "Length" arguments for example
get passed one of a whole bunch of potentially interesting values.
(Powers of 2 +/-1 are a good choice for triggering off-by-one bugs it
seems).

Trinity also shares those file descriptors between multiple threads,
which causes havoc sometimes.

If a child process successfully creates an mmap, the pointer is stored,
and fed to subsequent syscalls, sometimes with hilarious results.

Package trinity: Information

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