State Selection Algorithms and Their Impact on The Performance of Stateful Network Protocol Fuzzing

TL;DR

This paper evaluates various state selection algorithms for network protocol fuzzing on a common platform, revealing that while some outperform others in specific cases, overall improvements are modest, highlighting areas for future research.

Contribution

The study provides a comprehensive comparison of state selection algorithms within AFLNet, including a new algorithm AFLNetLegion, on a unified platform and benchmark.

Findings

Existing algorithms achieve similar code coverage.

AFLNetLegion outperforms in some cases.

Overall improvements are modest.

Abstract

The statefulness property of network protocol implementations poses a unique challenge for testing and verification techniques, including Fuzzing. Stateful fuzzers tackle this challenge by leveraging state models to partition the state space and assist the test generation process. Since not all states are equally important and fuzzing campaigns have time limits, fuzzers need effective state selection algorithms to prioritize progressive states over others. Several state selection algorithms have been proposed but they were implemented and evaluated separately on different platforms, making it hard to achieve conclusive findings. In this work, we evaluate an extensive set of state selection algorithms on the same fuzzing platform that is AFLNet, a state-of-the-art fuzzer for network servers. The algorithm set includes existing ones supported by AFLNet and our novel and principled algorithm called AFLNetLegion. The experimental results on the ProFuzzBench benchmark show that (i) the existing state selection algorithms of AFLNet achieve very similar code coverage, (ii) AFLNetLegion clearly outperforms these algorithms in selected case studies, but (iii) the overall improvement appears insignificant. These are unexpected yet interesting findings. We identify problems and share insights that could open opportunities for future research on this topic.