Seal: Towards Diverse Specification Inference for Linux Interfaces from Security Patches
Wei Chen, Bowen Zhang, Chengpeng Wang, Wensheng Tang, Charles Zhang · 2025
Linux utilizes interfaces as communication protocols across different subsystems while ensuring manageability. These interfaces standardize interactions between various subsystems; however, the absence of complete calling contexts can result in the mishandling of data from other entities, i.e., interaction data, thus incurring vulnerabilities. Even worse, the effectiveness of static bug detectors could be severely hindered due to the lack of interface specifications. Previous solutions, seeking to automate the inference of interface specifications, are tailored to a subset of the interaction data behavior and, hence are deficient in generalizability.