Combining Agentic AI and Lightweight Formal Methods To Find Bugs in a Production Hypervisor
This paper explores the combination of lightweight formal methods and agentic AI, specifically to find bugs in a production security-critical hypervisor. Building on the executable-specification framework of Memarian et al.\ for the Android pKVM hypervisor, we use an OpenAI Codex-based agent to write and refine specifications, expressed in the ambient C programming language, for a recent version of pKVM. We use this for bug-finding, with encouraging preliminary results: the agent found four previously unknown and substantial bugs, including violations of the intended page-ownership discipline and bugs that can lead to guest-memory leakage or hypervisor memory corruption. Interestingly, all the bugs claimed by the agent to be serious were actual bugs, without false positives, and the experiment needed less than one month of human work with a ChatGPT Pro subscription.
Mon 15 JunDisplayed time zone: Mountain Time (US & Canada) change
13:40 - 15:20 | |||
13:40 20mTalk | Combining Agentic AI and Lightweight Formal Methods To Find Bugs in a Production Hypervisor PAgE Hiroyuki Katsura University of Cambridge, Kayvan Memarian University of Cambridge, Peter Sewell University of Cambridge | ||
14:00 20mTalk | From Workarounds to Root Causes: Experience Using Agentic Workflows to Debug Complex Browser GPU Compiler Stacks PAgE Abhijit Ramesh UC Santa Cruz, Reese Levine University of California at Santa Cruz, Tyler Sorensen University of California at Santa Cruz | ||
14:20 20mTalk | Event-based Design Abstractions for Agent HarnessesRecorded PAgE McCoy Becker , Matin Ghavami Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Fabian Zaiser Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Timothy J. O'Donnell McGill University; Mila – Quebec AI Institute; CHI FRO; Canada CIFAR AI Chai, Mila, Martin C. Rinard Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Joshua B. Tenenbaum Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Vikash Mansinghka Massachusetts Institute of Technology | ||
14:40 20mTalk | Lumos: Let there be Language Model System CertificationRemote PAgE Isha Chaudhary , Vedaant Jain , Prineet Parhar , Kavya Sachdeva , Avaljot Singh University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Sayan Ranu , Gagandeep Singh University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Pre-print | ||
15:00 20mTalk | Lazy Validation and Self-Healing for Agentic ProgramsRemote PAgE Theodoros Tsampouris Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Eleftherios Ioannidis Microsoft Research, Andreas Symeonidis Aristotle University of Thessaloniki | ||