Challenges in Collecting Code Coverage from Blackbox Binaries During Fuzz Testing
By
matt_d
Summary
This article discusses the evolution of fuzz testing, specifically focusing on the challenges and techniques for collecting code coverage from blackbox binaries. It contrasts older, feedback-free fuzzing approaches with modern coverage-guided methods, and explores the "wrong way" to approach binary coverage — likely involving inefficient or incorrect instrumentation techniques. The piece provides technical depth on how coverage data can be gathered from compiled binaries without source code access, and the pitfalls that come with naive implementations.
Source
Hacker NewsChallenges in Collecting Code Coverage from Blackbox Binaries During Fuzz Testingredvice.orgKey quotes
· 3 pulledWay back in the age of the dinosaurs, if you wrote a program and wanted to test that it was correct, you mostly had two choices: you could either manually construct malformed inputs and try them in succession, or hook up a program which would randomly generate inputs and try them automatically.
Those programs were called fuzzers, or sometimes generators, and this was 'fuzz testing'.
the generator would have no feedback from the program under test except 'did this random input crash or not'.
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