mjbommar/ioctl-census

The IOCTL Census (Structural Tier)

A corpus-scale, multi-architecture map of the Windows driver I/O-control (IOCTL) dispatch surface, recovered deterministically across x86 and x64 from 27,087 signed drivers. This is the structural tier of the census described in the companion paper: the recovered surface itself, everything derivable from the already-public driver binary. It is a substrate for binary-analysis, attack-surface, and vulnerability-research work, not a list of vulnerabilities.

What this is

For each driver the deterministic pass recovers, with no symbolic execution and no kernel or device, the control-code dispatch surface and program structure: the IRP_MJ_DEVICE_CONTROL dispatch routine, every decoded control code split into device type, transfer method, required access, and function number, the handler functions and their reachability from the dispatcher, the inter-procedural call graph, imports/exports, and PE/signing provenance. One architecture-neutral recovery covers both x86 and x64, including the 32-bit half that x64-only symbolic scanners abort on.

Signed drivers	27,087
Drivers with a recovered surface	21,708 (80%)
Decoded control codes	3,089,633
Dispatch routines	927,542
Handler functions	848,094
Functions (x64 deep lane)	8,184,655
Call edges (x64 deep lane)	15,950,899
Cross-driver code cohorts	23,602

Corpus: Microsoft Update Catalog (ms-update-catalog) plus the inbox driver sets of three live Windows builds (live-*). All drivers are Authenticode-signed binaries that are themselves publicly retrievable.

Tables

All files are zstd-compressed Parquet under data/, keyed by (sha256, function_va) where applicable.

• binaries -- one row per driver: hashes, name, corpus/build, architecture, driver type, device names and embedded security descriptor, the permissive-descriptor flag, decoded-surface counts, PE version/signing provenance.
• ioctl_codes -- every decoded control code: device_type, method, access, function_code, linked to its handler.
• dispatchers -- recovered dispatch routines with the recovery backend.
• handlers -- handler functions, reachability, and IOCTL distance.
• functions / call_edges -- the per-function layer and inter-procedural call graph (x64 deep lane).
• imports / exports -- the import/export feature vectors.
• v_cross_build -- the cross-driver view: a shared decoded (device_type, function_code) grouped across builds, architectures, vendors.
• v_driver_features -- a one-row-per-driver feature summary.

See MANIFEST.json for exact row counts and column lists.

What is deliberately withheld

This release is structural only. To avoid publishing a targeting map of candidate unprivileged-reachable kernel primitives on shipping drivers, the following are not included: the buffered-input taint sinks, the language-model risk verdicts, the structural bug-class lead set, the symbolic-execution (ioctlance) results, and the authors' own findings linkage. The structural tier localizes no exploitable primitive: it records that a device is reachable and which control codes it decodes, both derivable from the public binary, but not where an unchecked write lives.

Intended use and limits

For defensive and authorized vulnerability-research, binary-analysis, and measurement work. The user_reachable flag is a static read of an embedded device descriptor and is a prefilter, not a runtime fact. The x86 lane is surface-only (dispatch and codes, validated against independent disassembly; no per-function layer). NDIS miniport drivers contribute OID request codes, which are control codes the dispatcher compares against but arrive via the NDIS path, not DeviceIoControl; filter on driver model if you want IOCTL specifically.

Provenance and reproducibility

The deterministic recovery runs on the open-source binary-analysis engine glaurung, which supplies the lifting, disassembly, and architecture-neutral intermediate representation. The method is described in the companion paper, The IOCTL Census: A Corpus-Scale, Multi-Architecture Database of the Windows Driver Control-Code Surface.

Citation

@misc{ioctlcensus2026,
  title  = {The IOCTL Census: A Corpus-Scale, Multi-Architecture Database of the
            Windows Driver Control-Code Surface},
  author = {Bommarito II, Michael J.},
  year   = {2026},
  note   = {Structural-tier dataset.}
}