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Concept
Fuzzing
Summary
In programming and software development, fuzzing or fuzz testing is an automated software testing technique that involves providing invalid, unexpected, or random data as inputs to a computer program. The program is then monitored for exceptions such as crashes, failing built-in code assertions, or potential memory leaks. Typically, fuzzers are used to test programs that take structured inputs. This structure is specified, e.g., in a or protocol and distinguishes valid from invalid input. An effective fuzzer generates semi-valid inputs that are "valid enough" in that they are not directly rejected by the parser, but do create unexpected behaviors deeper in the program and are "invalid enough" to expose corner cases that have not been properly dealt with.
For the purpose of security, input that crosses a trust boundary is often the most useful. For example, it is more important to fuzz code that handles the upload of a file by any user than it is to fuzz the code that parses a configuration file that is accessible only to a privileged user.
The term "fuzz" originates from a fall 1988 class project in the graduate Advanced Operating Systems class (CS736), taught by Prof. Barton Miller at the University of Wisconsin, whose results were subsequently published in 1990. To fuzz test a UNIX utility meant to automatically generate random input and command-line parameters for the utility. The project was designed to test the reliability of UNIX command line programs by executing a large number of random inputs in quick succession until they crashed. Miller's team was able to crash 25 to 33 percent of the utilities that they tested. They then debugged each of the crashes to determine the cause and categorized each detected failure. To allow other researchers to conduct similar experiments with other software, the source code of the tools, the test procedures, and the raw result data were made publicly available. This early fuzzing would now be called black box, generational, unstructured (dumb) fuzzing.
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