OSmartPro: a large language model-assisted option fuzzing approach

Abstract Program options provide flexible software functionality control but complicate fuzz testing, as triggering many behaviors require specific option combinations. Although existing option-aware fuzzing approaches attempt to mutate options as inputs or leverage AI technologies to extract option relationships from documentation, these methods have limitations. Documentation is often incomplete, and some option dependencies are embedded deeply within program logic via data or control flows, making these methods challenging to detect all possible dependencies. This paper introduces OSmartPro , an advanced option-fuzzing approach that directly extracts options and infers option dependencies from source code. Given LLM’s capabilities to interpret program semantics, OSmartPro employs LLM-assisted static analysis to handle diverse option-parsing structures and extract comprehensive options. Through control and data dependency analysis, it constructs option impact graph , which it uses to guide fuzzing strategies. The tool successfully extracted complete options from all 59 programs in our test set, uncovering undocumented options in over 66% of them. Additionally, OSmartPro inferred 14,701 option combinations, identified 45.03% more execution paths compared to AFL++, and uncovered 54 zero-day vulnerabilities, of which 18 awarded CVE IDs. Lastly, in a benchmark comparison against four option-aware fuzzers, OSmartPro achieved higher line coverage in 66.7% (20 out of 30) of the programs.