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by jakevn 2745 days ago
Except for the fact that it is exactly the method that has been used to discover a large number of critical bugs in the most popular OSS projects (including SQLite): http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/afl/
1 comments

Fuzzing isn't really practical if all you do is just generate a totally random bit stream for input. There are many much more clever and robust strategies to hit as many edge cases as possible. Check AFL[1] for some details on generating smart random input files. You can also combine that with pretty advanced dynamic execution analysis to fuzz against unknown processor instruction sets, like in sandsifter[2].

[1]: http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/afl/

[2]: https://github.com/xoreaxeaxeax/sandsifter

On the contrary, for years, the most prolific fuzzers basically did just generate random bitstreams, and that technique will still find vulnerabilities in all the memory-unsafe software that hasn't been fished out by those same dumb fuzzers.