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Automatically Fuzzing Routing Protocols

Routing protocols are key protocols on the public
Internet and in enterprise networks. Routers exchange control
messages to compute their routing tables. A bug in the processing
of such messages could cause routers to crash or reboot, leading
to wide scale disruptions. We propose a generic fuzzing approach
that is able to automatically predict the structure of routing
packets based on collected packet traces. We automatically
extract header length, checksum and the Type-Length-Value
structure of such protocols. We leverage this inferred structure to
generate fuzzed routing messages and we apply this approach to
three very different protocols: IS-IS, EIGRP and Babel. Our
experiments reveal three major problems in an open-source
implementation of EIGRP that have now been fixed by the
maintainers and one problem in the IS-IS implementation.

Author(s)

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
10.23919/IFIPNetworking70592.2026.11579181
Author(s) not member of CyberExcellence
Olivier Bonaventure