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by yaps8 3185 days ago
Well, if you compare the situation where an adversary has access to source code with a situation where they don't - everyting else being the same - , they have higher chance of finding vulnerabilities in the first.

The "security-by-obscurity" point does apply when you compare "going open-source with many observers" to "being closed-source with no one looking", but this is not the case here.

1 comments

...now enter fuzz testing and your first statement goes out the window.
Fuzz testing is far, far easier and more complete if you have the source code. It is not required to have the source to fuzz, but white-box fuzzing can be combined with code coverage analysis to make sure you hit all code paths, including ones that would rely upon a more structured sequencing of the inputs. Black-box fuzzing could eventually reach the same end result, but it would take far longer or far more resources.