We reflect on the 5-year impact of our protocol fuzzer #AFLNet on research & practice in this journal extension *just accepted* at the Transactions on Software Engineering.

📝https://mpi-softsec.github.io/papers/TSE25-aflnet.pdf
🧑‍💻https://github.com/aflnet/aflnet

Led by Ruijie and Thuan, w/ Abhik

High-Performance Network Fuzzing with LibAFL and libdesock

Custom fuzzer using LibAFL and libdesock achieves 42x speedup over AFLNet via tokenized inputs and shared memory, uncovering new bugs.

https://lolcads.github.io/posts/2025/05/high_performance_network_fuzzing/

#Fuzzing #Network

Guangzhu Xu, Pengcheng Zuo, Zhi Ke, Bangjun Lei: LPTR-AFLNet: Lightweight Integrated Chinese License Plate Rectification and Recognition Network https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.16362 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.16362 https://arxiv.org/html/2507.16362

Security researchers have written experience reports and tutorials about the application of AFLNET to challenging targets such as as the 5G network, Internet of Things (IoT), to medical imaging applications, and to automotive systems highlighting its impact on practice.

We also believe that our open science approach was an important accelerator of its success in practice and research. Thuan as the primary developer and active maintainer of #AFLNet still accepts new protocols and pull request.

But what is state? AFLNet uses the server's response code as proxy of the current state.

This is where the community has made most progress. For instance, we found that the values assigned to (enum-type) state variables better captures state transitions: mboehme.github.io/paper/USENIX...

In 2020, we introduce #AFLNet, the first greybox fuzzer that would be both code- and state-coverage guided.

Guangzhu Xu, Pengcheng Zuo, Zhi Ke, Bangjun Lei
LPTR-AFLNet: Lightweight Integrated Chinese License Plate Rectification and Recognition Network
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.16362

In our TSE'25 journal extension, we give a detailed empirical evaluation of its main components and broad overview of recent progress in (code- and state-) coverage-guided protocol fuzzing since AFLNet: mboehme.github.io/paper/TSE25-...

“AFLNet Five Years Later: On Coverage-Guided Protocol Fuzzing”

A look back at the last five years since the release of AFLNet, “the first code- and state-coverage-guided protocol fuzzer.”

arxiv.org/abs/2412.20324

Over the past five years, #AFLNet has received tremendous attention from both the research community and industry. As of today, it has garnered 892 stars on GitHub. It supports 17 protocols, most of which were contributed by other researchers.

github.com/aflnet/aflnet