[HN Gopher] Fuzz Testing and Fuzz History (2017)
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       Fuzz Testing and Fuzz History (2017)
        
       Author : dxs
       Score  : 22 points
       Date   : 2022-09-25 00:43 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (secretsofconsulting.blogspot.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (secretsofconsulting.blogspot.com)
        
       | aaron695 wrote:
       | He also edited Bebugging -
       | 
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bebugging
       | 
       | Passed away 2018
       | 
       | Wiki edits -
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/GeraldMW...
       | 
       | Only about a literal fingers on one hand of new things in
       | computer science since 1980.
       | 
       | But I have no idea how this could work. What would you learn from
       | a random card? How would it not just fault out at step one
       | correctly so?
       | 
       | There's even an argument on "Talk" if it's Fuzzing if it's
       | random.
       | 
       | It'd be interesting to know what was happening.
       | 
       | Where is there a punch card emulator & punch cards that we can
       | try this on?
        
         | dan-robertson wrote:
         | Similar to bebugging is mutation testing which is randomly
         | mutating a program and then looking for examples which still
         | pass tests as an indication of test coverage. Though many may
         | be mutations that didn't change semantics if your code is well
         | tested.
         | 
         | I tried to hack some mutation testing together in a horrific
         | way: I wrote some regexp source-code manipulation to replace
         | all constants in the source code with variables and some code
         | at the top to read those constants from stdin. Then run the
         | tests and segfault if all the tests pass. Then a fuzzer like
         | afl can be used to try to find mutations. Though these
         | mutations would be relatively trivial (not eg swapping two
         | dependant lines of code that lead to a rare race condition, but
         | this is why it's good to have a large set of different
         | testing/debugging tools).
        
         | shakezula wrote:
         | > there's even an argument if it's fuzzing if it's random
         | 
         | One of the most important but oft overlooked aspects of proper
         | fuzz testing is the corpus and mutation of the inputs from it.
         | Detractors of fuzz testing often argue that they don't see the
         | value of it but they load up an empty corpus with a dumb fuzzer
         | and wonder why they see thin to no results.
         | 
         | In my experience, you need to properly maintain a corpus to see
         | the benefits of fuzz testing, and it's often best to try
         | starting from blank as well as from an existing corpus. For
         | example, when fuzzing Go, I have used the AFL corpus with good
         | results, since it comes preloaded with a bunch of error causing
         | inputs.
        
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       (page generated 2022-09-26 23:02 UTC)