LLM-Boofuzz: Generation-Based Black-Box Fuzzing for Network Protocols via LLMs
Identifying network protocol vulnerabilities is critical for cyberspace security. Generation-based black-box protocol fuzzing is widely used but faces challenges: over-reliance on manual protocol analysis and script writing, single-threaded fuzzing, and lack of dynamic fuzzing strategy optimization. To address these, we propose LLM-Boofuzz, a generation-based black-box protocol fuzzing framework via Large Language Models (LLMs). It leverages LLMs to parse real traffic to extract protocol information, guides LLMs to generate executable scripts with a repair mechanism, and enables multi-script iterative fuzzing via an LLM-based agent. Experiments show that LLM-Boofuzz outperforms state-of-the-art tools: it triggers all 15 test vulnerabilities (vs. 8/7/7 for Boofuzz/Snipuzz/AFLNet) and achieves an average 53.4% code line coverage on two protocol programs (vs. 30.65%/31.95%/41.65%), providing an efficient solution for network protocol fuzzing.
Authors
- Miao Hu (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6370-5564)
- Zulie Pan (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5775-5824)
- Zixiong Li (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0008-8817-2013)
- Yifan Zhang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0009-4214-8664)
- Qiangpu Chen (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7884-7998)
- Yuwei Li (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8878-510X)
- Tian Wang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0001-3327-8223)
- Qian Chen (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0006-9482-5135)
Institutions
- Anhui University (CN)
- National University of Defense Technology (CN)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Electronics
- Published
- 2025-11-21
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics14234550
- Primary Topic
- Software Testing and Debugging Techniques
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00