Enhancing ROS System Fuzzing through Callback Tracing

The Robot Operating System 2 (ROS) is the de-facto standard for robotic software development, with a wide application in diverse safety-critical domains. There are many efforts in testing that seek to deliver a more secure ROS codebase. However, existing testing methods are often inadequate to capture the complex and stateful behaviors inherent to ROS deployments, resulting in limited test- ing effectiveness. In this paper, we propose R2D2, a ROS system fuzzer that leverages ROS’s runtime states as guidance to increase fuzzing effectiveness and efficiency. Unlike traditional fuzzers, R2D2 employs a systematic instrumentation strategy that captures the system’s runtime behaviors and profiles the current system state in real-time. This approach provides a more in-depth understanding of system behaviors, thereby facilitating a more insightful explo- ration of ROS’s extensive state space. For evaluation, we applied it to four well-known ROS applications. Our evaluation shows that R2D2 achieves an improvement of 3.91× and 2.56× in code coverage compared to state-of-the-art ROS fuzzers, including Ros2Fuzz and RoboFuzz, while also uncovering 39 previously unknown vulnera- bilities, with 6 fixed in both ROS runtime and ROS applications. For its runtime overhead, R2D2 maintains an average execution and memory usage overhead with 10.4% and 1.0% in respect, making R2D2 effective in ROS testing.