A Survey of Fuzzing Open-Source Operating Systems
Operating Systems
2026-01-21 v3 Cryptography and Security
Software Engineering
Abstract
Vulnerabilities in open-source operating systems (OSs) pose substantial security risks to software systems, making their detection crucial. While fuzzing has been an effective vulnerability detection technique in various domains, OS fuzzing (OSF) faces unique challenges due to OS complexity and multi-layered interaction, and has not been comprehensively reviewed. Therefore, this work systematically surveys the state-of-the-art OSF techniques, categorizes them based on the general fuzzing process, and investigates challenges specific to kernel, file system, driver, and hypervisor fuzzing. Finally, future research directions for OSF are discussed.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2502.13163,
title = {A Survey of Fuzzing Open-Source Operating Systems},
author = {Kun Hu and Qicai Chen and Wenzhuo Zhang and Zilong Lu and Bihuan Chen and You Lu and Haowen Jiang and Bingkun Sun and Xin Peng and Wenyun Zhao},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.13163},
year = {2026}
}
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35 pages