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Identifying stateful failures in an SDN controller is challenging due to the infinite possible sequences of control messages, which result in an unbounded number of stateful interactions between the controller and network devices. In this article, we propose SeqFuzzSDN, a learning-guided fuzzing method for testing stateful SDN controllers. SeqFuzzSDN aims to (1) efficiently explore the state space of the SDN controller under test, (2) generate effective and diverse tests (i.e., control message sequences) to uncover failures and (3) infer accurate failure-inducing models that characterise the message sequences leading to failures. In addition, we compare SeqFuzzSDN with three extensions of state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods for fuzzing SDNs. Our findings show that, compared to the extended SOTA methods, SeqFuzzSDN (1) generates more diverse message sequences that lead to failures within the same time budget and (2) produces more accurate failure-inducing models, significantly outperforming the other extended SOTA methods in terms of sensitivity.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1145\/3733717","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2025,5,2]],"date-time":"2025-05-02T12:32:49Z","timestamp":1746189169000},"page":"1-45","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1145\/crossmark-policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":1,"title":["Learning-Guided Fuzzing for Testing Stateful SDN Controllers"],"prefix":"10.1145","volume":"35","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-8219-0466","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Rapha\u00ebl","family":"Ollando","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"SnT Centre, University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg, Luxembourg"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-9025-7173","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Seung Yeob","family":"Shin","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"SnT Centre, University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg, Luxembourg"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-1393-1010","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Lionel C.","family":"Briand","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Lero SFI Centre for Software Research, University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland and University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada"}]}],"member":"320","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2026,1,21]]},"reference":[{"key":"e_1_3_1_2_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1007\/978-0-85729-277-3_7"},{"key":"e_1_3_1_3_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3544216.3544220"},{"key":"e_1_3_1_4_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1109\/LCN.2016.83"},{"key":"e_1_3_1_5_2","first-page":"1","volume-title":"Proceedings of the 2019 International Conference on Advances in the Emerging Computing Technologies","author":"Alshanqiti Abdullah M.","year":"2019","unstructured":"Abdullah M. 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