syzkaller VS gvisor

Compare syzkaller vs gvisor and see what are their differences.

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syzkaller gvisor
7 64
5,124 15,066
1.5% 2.8%
0.0 9.9
1 day ago 5 days ago
Go Go
Apache License 2.0 Apache License 2.0
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

syzkaller

Posts with mentions or reviews of syzkaller. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-02-17.
  • Automated Unit Test Improvement Using Large Language Models at Meta
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Feb 2024
    https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.09171 :

    > This paper describes Meta's TestGen-LLM tool, which uses LLMs to automatically improve existing human-written tests. TestGen-LLM verifies that its generated test classes successfully clear a set of filters that assure measurable improvement over the original test suite, thereby eliminating problems due to LLM hallucination. [...] We believe this is the first report on industrial scale deployment of LLM-generated code backed by such assurances of code improvement.

    Coverage-guided unit test improvement might [with LLMs] be efficient too.

    https://github.com/topics/coverage-guided-fuzzing :

    - e.g. Google/syzkaller is a coverage-guided syscall fuzzer: https://github.com/google/syzkaller

    - Gitlab CI supports coverage-guided fuzzing: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/application_security/coverag...

    - oss-fuzz, osv

    Additional ways to improve tests:

    Hypothesis and pynguin generate tests from type annotations.

    There are various tools to generate type annotations for Python code;

    > pytype (Google) [1], PyAnnotate (Dropbox) [2], and MonkeyType (Instagram) [3] all do dynamic / runtime PEP-484 type annotation type inference [4] to generate type annotations. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39139198

    icontract-hypothesis generates tests from icontract DbC Design by Contract type, value, and invariance constraints specified as precondition and postcondition @decorators:

  • Differ: Tool for testing and validating transformed programs
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 31 Jan 2024
    https://google.github.io/clusterfuzz/setting-up-fuzzing/libf...

    > OSS-Fuzz runs CloudFuzz[Lite?] for many open source repos and feeds OSV OpenSSF Vulnerability Format: https://github.com/google/osv#current-data-sources

    .

    Google/syzkaller https://github.com/google/syzkaller :

    >> syzkaller is an unsupervised coverage-guided kernel fuzzer. Supported OSes: Akaros, FreeBSD, Fuchsia, gVisor, Linux, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Windows

    .

    ghidra-patchdiff-correlator:

  • Fuzz Testing Is the Best Thing to Happen to Our Application Tests
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Aug 2023
    The key to modern fuzzing is feedback, usually some kind of coverage testing of the program under test. This allows the fuzzer to be much smarter about how it finds new code paths, and makes fuzzing find bugs a lot quicker.

    Google have a project to do fuzzing on Linux system calls using coverage feedback: https://github.com/google/syzkaller

  • Is there a Linux user-space program that causes execution through every kernel function path and context?
    1 project | /r/kernel | 5 Jun 2023
    Utilities that try to exercise ("fuzz") an interface with the intent of discovering bugs are called "fuzzers". The tool that comes to mind is syzkaller.
  • Those scary warnings of juice jacking in airports and hotels? They’re nonsense
    1 project | /r/technology | 1 May 2023
    It's true that USB is probably a less desirable attack surface than modems, because it actually requires the user to physically connect their device to a malicious device, but I wouldn't discount it as impractical and unlikely to happen in the wild. There's a reason some of the more famous malware and spyware used to spread/attack over USB. Google actually does USB driver fuzzing and the amount of potentially devastating vulnerabilities is staggering.
  • Linux System Call Table – Chromiumos
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 30 Oct 2022
  • Audit of Linux kernel code
    2 projects | /r/linuxquestions | 14 Dec 2021

gvisor

Posts with mentions or reviews of gvisor. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-01-03.
  • Maestro: A Linux-compatible kernel in Rust
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 3 Jan 2024
    Isn't gVisor kind of this as well?

    "gVisor is an application kernel for containers. It limits the host kernel surface accessible to the application while still giving the application access to all the features it expects. Unlike most kernels, gVisor does not assume or require a fixed set of physical resources; instead, it leverages existing host kernel functionality and runs as a normal process. In other words, gVisor implements Linux by way of Linux."

    https://github.com/google/gvisor

  • Google/Gvisor: Application Kernel for Containers
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 2 Jan 2024
  • GVisor: OCI Runtime with Application Kernel
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 2 Jan 2024
  • How to Escape a Container
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 20 Dec 2023
  • Faster Filesystem Access with Directfs
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 28 Jul 2023
    This sort of feels like seeing someone riding a bike and saying: why don’t they just get a car? The simple fact is that containers and VMs are quite different. Whether something uses VMX and friends or not is also a red herring, as gVisor also “rolls it own VMM” [1].

    [1] https://github.com/google/gvisor/tree/master/pkg/sentry/plat...

  • OS in Go? Why Not
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 21 May 2023
    There's two major production-ready Go-based operating system(-ish) projects:

    - Google's gVisor[1] (a re-implementation of a significant subset of the Linux syscall ABI for isolation, also mentioned in the article)

    - USBArmory's Tamago[2] (a single-threaded bare-metal Go runtime for SOCs)

    Both of these are security-focused with a clear trade off: sacrifice some performance for memory safe and excellent readability (and auditability). I feel like that's the sweet spot for low-level Go - projects that need memory safety but would rather trade some performance for simplicity.

    [1]: https://github.com/google/gvisor

    [2]: https://github.com/usbarmory/tamago

  • Tunwg: Expose your Go HTTP servers online with end to end TLS
    2 projects | /r/golang | 2 May 2023
    It uses gVisor to create a TCP/IP stack in userspace, and starts a wireguard interface on it, which the HTTP server from http.Serve listens on. The library will print a URL after startup, where you can access your server. You can create multiple listeners in one binary.
  • How does go playground work?
    3 projects | /r/golang | 30 Apr 2023
    The playground compiles the program with GOOS=linux, GOARCH=amd64 and runs the program with gVisor. Detailed documentation is available at the gVisor site.
  • Searchable Linux Syscall Table for x86 and x86_64
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 14 Apr 2023
  • Multi-tenancy in Kubernetes
    13 projects | dev.to | 10 Apr 2023
    You could use a container sandbox like gVisor, light virtual machines as containers (Kata containers, firecracker + containerd) or full virtual machines (virtlet as a CRI).

What are some alternatives?

When comparing syzkaller and gvisor you can also consider the following projects:

AFLplusplus - The fuzzer afl++ is afl with community patches, qemu 5.1 upgrade, collision-free coverage, enhanced laf-intel & redqueen, AFLfast++ power schedules, MOpt mutators, unicorn_mode, and a lot more!

firecracker - Secure and fast microVMs for serverless computing.

vuls - Agent-less vulnerability scanner for Linux, FreeBSD, Container, WordPress, Programming language libraries, Network devices

podman - Podman: A tool for managing OCI containers and pods.

wtf - wtf is a distributed, code-coverage guided, customizable, cross-platform snapshot-based fuzzer designed for attacking user and / or kernel-mode targets running on Microsoft Windows and Linux user-mode (experimental!).

wsl-vpnkit - Provides network connectivity to WSL 2 when blocked by VPN

ipa-medit - Memory modification tool for re-signed ipa supports iOS apps running on iPhone and Apple Silicon Mac without jailbreaking.

kata-containers - Kata Containers is an open source project and community working to build a standard implementation of lightweight Virtual Machines (VMs) that feel and perform like containers, but provide the workload isolation and security advantages of VMs. https://katacontainers.io/

xpid - Linux Process Discovery. C Library, Go bindings, Runtime.

sysbox - An open-source, next-generation "runc" that empowers rootless containers to run workloads such as Systemd, Docker, Kubernetes, just like VMs.

cfuzzer - url-fuzzer

containerd - An open and reliable container runtime