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raddan 5 days ago

You can often find memory errors not directly related to string handling with fuzz testing. More generally, if your program embodies any kind of state machine, you may find that a good fuzzer drives it into states that you did not think should exist.

manmal 5 days ago | parent [-]

That sounds a bit like using a jackhammer to drive in a nail. Wouldn’t it be smarter to enumerate edge cases and test all permutations of those?

quacksilver 5 days ago | parent [-]

Would it even be possible to enumerate all edge cases and test all the permutations of them in non-trivial codebases or interconnected systems? How do you know when you have all of the edge cases?

With fuzzing you can randomly generate bad input that passes all of your test cases that were written using by whatever method you have already been using but still causes the application to crash or behave badly. This may mean that there are more tests that you could write that would catch the issue related to the fuzz case, or the fuzz case itself could be used as a test.

Using probability you can get to 90 or 99% or 99.999% or whatever confidence level you need that the software is unaffected by bugs based on the input size / number of fuzz test cases. In many non-critical situations the goal may not be 100% but 'statistically very unlikely with a known probability and error'

5 days ago | parent | next [-]
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manmal 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Thanks for elaborating, I might start fuzzing.