DragonRadar: Fuzzing Linux Kernel Deployed in Cloud-Native Environment
Heyuan Shi, Weibo Zhang, Runzhe Wang, Xiaohai Shi, Guoyu Yin, Shijun Chen, Yuhan Chen, Qiang Zhang, Jianzhong Liu, Yuheng Shen · 2025
Kata Containers is a secure container runtime with lightweight virtual machines and a customized Linux kernel optimized for cloud-native workloads, which is important for cloud-native systems. Fuzzing is a widely-used technique for detecting kernel vulnerability. However, current kernel fuzzers can't be simply applied to kernels in cloud-native environments because of the discrepancies between test and actual deployment scenarios. This paper introduces DragonRadar, a kernel fuzzing tool adapted for Kata Containers, which aligns the testing environment with cloud deployment realities. We extend to support kernel fuzzing in cloud-native environments by integrating Syzkaller's capability with a lightweight virtual machine manager called Dragonball. The evaluation shows that DragonRadar effectively identifies 25 kernel vulnerabilities in the mainline Linux kernel used in the Kata Containers environment, while maintaining code coverage similar to vanilla Syzkaller. DragonRadar is available at https://github.com/TOBESTONG//DragonRadar.