A Survey of Protocol Fuzzing

TL;DR

This survey provides a comprehensive overview of protocol fuzzing, highlighting challenges, categorizing existing research, and discussing future directions to improve security in protocol implementations.

Contribution

It systematically categorizes and summarizes existing protocol fuzzing research, addressing key challenges and guiding future investigations in the field.

Findings

Identified key challenges in protocol fuzzing

Categorized existing research efforts systematically

Discussed promising future research directions

Abstract

Communication protocols form the bedrock of our interconnected world, yet vulnerabilities within their implementations pose significant security threats. Recent developments have seen a surge in fuzzing-based research dedicated to uncovering these vulnerabilities within protocol implementations. However, there still lacks a systematic overview of protocol fuzzing for answering the essential questions such as what the unique challenges are, how existing works solve them, etc. To bridge this gap, we conducted a comprehensive investigation of related works from both academia and industry. Our study includes a detailed summary of the specific challenges in protocol fuzzing, and provides a systematic categorization and overview of existing research efforts. Furthermore, we explore and discuss potential future research directions in protocol fuzzing. This survey serves as a foundational guideline for researchers and practitioners in the field.