How would an attacker remotely take over a personal Linux or Android device? Send a malicious link and get code execution through the browser? Or target a messenger or an email client? Well, how about sending a series of network packets and owning the kernel directly 😋

This article covers my experience with fuzzing the Linux kernel externally over the network. I’ll explain how I extended a kernel fuzzer called syzkaller for this purpose and show off the found bugs. The article also includes an introduction to syzkaller and its advanced feature — pseudo-syscalls.

Sadly, to find that one bug to take over the Internet — I failed. But I did manage to find a one-shot RCE in a non-public kernel flavor.