Registered Report: NSFuzz: Towards Efficient and State-Aware Network Service Fuzzing

to the entire cyberspace, and it is vital to explore vulnerabilities in protocol implementations. Abstract —As the essential component responsible for com- munication, network services are security-critical, and it is vital to find v u lnerabilities i n t h em. F u zzing i s c u rrently o n e o f the most popular software vulnerability discovery techniques, widely adopted due to its high efficiency and low false positives. However, existing coverage-guided fuzzers mainly aim at stateless local applications, leaving stateful network services underexplored. Recently, some fuzzers targeting network services have been proposed but have certain limitations, e.g., insufficient o r inaccurate state representation and low testing efficiency. In this paper, we propose a fuzzing NSFuzz for stateful network services. Specifically, e s t udied t y pical of network service and o and accordingly a program variable-based state representation scheme and efficient i n teraction s y e chanism analysis identify network event and extract state variables, then achieves fast I/O synchronization and efficient s t ate-aware f u zzing v i a l i ghtweight compile-time instrumentation. The preliminary evaluation results show that, compared with state-of-the-art network service fuzzers AFL NET and S TATE AFL, our solution NSFuzz could infer a more accurate state model during fuzzing and improve the testing throughput by up to 50x and the coverage by up to 20%.