A Systematic Review of Network Protocol Fuzzing Techniques

Improper network protocol implementations usually bring about serious consequences. Therefore, network protocol security testing has become a hot area of research in network and information security. Popular vulnerability discovery techniques include static analysis, dynamic analysis, fuzzing and so on. With the increasing scale and complexity of software, fuzzing has incomparable advantages over other vulnerability discovery techniques and becomes the most common and effective one in network protocol security testing. Firstly, this paper introduces the basic principle and classification of network protocol fuzzing. Then this paper briefly shows the basic process of network protocol fuzzing and the fundamental structure of a network protocol fuzzing system. Next, this paper describes research advances of network protocol fuzzing techniques and machine learning techniques applied to network protocol fuzzing in details. Finally, this paper concludes some existing problems of network protocol fuzzing techniques and discusses future research directions.