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Software Technology Research
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545-554

Industrial control protocols fuzz testing method based on multi-scale latent feature representation

Lian Lian1,2
Sun Shiming1,2
Wang Guogang1,2
Ning Bowei2,3
He Kan1,2
Sun Yifei1,2
Zong Xuejun1,2
1. School of Information Engineering, Shenyang University of Chemical Technology, Shenyang 110142, China
2. Liaoning Key Laboratory of Information Security for Petrochemical Industry, Shenyang 110142, China
3. School of Artificial Intelligence, Shenyang University of Technology, Shenyang 110870, China

Abstract

Industrial control protocols(ICP) have a large number of vulnerabilities due to the lack of authentication, authorization, and encryption measures, which seriously threaten the safety of industrial control systems(ICS). Fuzzing, as a common method for vulnerability mining, has the disadvantages of a low reception rate and insufficient diversity of generated test cases in ICPs. To address these issues and enhance the efficiency of ICPs vulnerability mining, this paper proposed a fuzzing methodology for ICPs based on multi-scale latent feature representation. It combined Transformer and GAN in the latent space. It used the Transformer to obtain vector representations of the latent features of protocol messages, while a dynamic multi-scale discriminator captured semantic information at different scales in the latent representations, fusing local field features and global semantic features, thereby improving the acceptance rate of test cases. Additionally, it introduced a self-adversarial learning strategy to train the GAN, reducing redundancy in latent feature representations, and increasing the diversity of test cases. Based on the above mentioned approaches, it constructed a universal fuzzing framework, MLFRFuzzer, that could be applied to most ICPs, and verified its performance on several typical ICPs, including S7comm, Ethernet/IP, and Modbus/TCP. Experimental results show that MLFRFuzzer achieves higher test case reception rates and greater diversity, and outperforms DCGANFuzzer, WGANFuzzer, and PeachFuzzer by approximately 23.76%, 44.07%, and 71.96%, respectively, in terms of the test target anomaly rate, validating the effectiveness and generalizability of MLFRFuzzer. In addition, it demonstrates stronger vulnerability mining capabilities than traditional ICPs fuzzing methods.

Foundation Support

辽宁省自然科学基金资助项目(2023-MSLH-273)
辽宁省科学技术计划资助项目(2023JH1/10400082)
辽宁省人工智能创新发展计划资助项目(2023JH26/1030008)
辽宁省科技创新平台建设计划资助项目([2022]36号)

Publish Information

DOI: 10.19734/j.issn.1001-3695.2024.07.0239
Publish at: Application Research of Computers Printed Article, Vol. 42, 2025 No. 2
Section: Software Technology Research
Pages: 545-554
Serial Number: 1001-3695(2025)02-031-0545-10

Publish History

[2025-02-05] Printed Article

Cite This Article

连莲, 孙世明, 王国刚, 等. 基于多尺度潜在特征表示的工业控制协议模糊测试方法 [J]. 计算机应用研究, 2025, 42 (2): 545-554. (Lian Lian, Sun Shiming, Wang Guogang, et al. Industrial control protocols fuzz testing method based on multi-scale latent feature representation [J]. Application Research of Computers, 2025, 42 (2): 545-554. )

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  • Application Research of Computers Monthly Journal
  • Journal ID ISSN 1001-3695
    CN  51-1196/TP

Application Research of Computers, founded in 1984, is an academic journal of computing technology sponsored by Sichuan Institute of Computer Sciences under the Science and Technology Department of Sichuan Province.

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