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Abstract

As essential components for communication, network protocol programs are highly security-critical, making it crucial to identify their vulnerabilities. Fuzzing is one of the most popular software vulnerability discovery techniques, being highly efficient and having low false-positive rates. However, current network protocol fuzzing is hindered by the coarse-grained and missing state annotations in programs. The current solutions primarily rely on the manual modification of programs, which is inefficient and prone to omissions. In this paper, we propose StatePre, a novel state-handling method for stateful network protocol programs, which leverages large language model (LLM) code- and text-understanding capabilities to analyze request for comments (RFC)-defined state knowledge and optimize the state handling of programs for fuzzing. StatePre automatically refines coarse-grained state annotations and complements missing state annotations in programs to ensure precise state tracking and fuzzing effectiveness. We implement a prototype of StatePre. The evaluation shows that programs modified with StatePre, with fine-grained and comprehensive state annotations, achieve better fuzzing efficiency, higher code coverage, and improved crash detection compared to those not modified with StatePre. Moreover, StatePre demonstrates good scalability, thus is applicable to various network protocol programs.

Details

1009240
Business indexing term
Title
StatePre: A Large Language Model-Based State-Handling Method for Network Protocol Fuzzing
Author
Zhang, Yifan 1   VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Zhu Kailong 1   VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Peng, Jie 2   VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Lu, Yuliang 1   VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Chen, Qian 2   VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Li Zixiong 1   VIAFID ORCID Logo 

 College of Electronic Engineering, National University of Defense Technology, Hefei 230037, China; [email protected] (Y.Z.); [email protected] (K.Z.); [email protected] (J.P.); [email protected] (Q.C.); [email protected] (Z.L.), Anhui Province Key Laboratory of Cyberspace Security Situation Awareness and Evaluation, Hefei 230037, China 
 College of Electronic Engineering, National University of Defense Technology, Hefei 230037, China; [email protected] (Y.Z.); [email protected] (K.Z.); [email protected] (J.P.); [email protected] (Q.C.); [email protected] (Z.L.) 
Publication title
Volume
14
Issue
10
First page
1931
Publication year
2025
Publication date
2025
Publisher
MDPI AG
Place of publication
Basel
Country of publication
Switzerland
Publication subject
e-ISSN
20799292
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
Document type
Journal Article
Publication history
 
 
Online publication date
2025-05-09
Milestone dates
2025-04-09 (Received); 2025-05-06 (Accepted)
Publication history
 
 
   First posting date
09 May 2025
ProQuest document ID
3211937449
Document URL
https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/statepre-large-language-model-based-state/docview/3211937449/se-2?accountid=208611
Copyright
© 2025 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.
Last updated
2025-05-27
Database
ProQuest One Academic