fuzzers

Researchers put Shellshock proof of concept exploit code into fuzzers[0] and managed to find five more bugs subsequently[1].

In their extreme whitebox fuzzers even incorporate constraint solvers to directly solve inputs that take the program to previously unexplored paths.

While I was at work, I'd also be checking my fuzzers, seeing if I had any new exceptions.

By pre announcing the existence of the flaw they've helped miscreants point their fuzzers at a target, potentially putting users at risk.

I'm a big fan of fuzzers and believe the HeartBleed bug could have been found by one.

It is neat that it is 2015 and fuzzers are cool again, though.

And in the meantime: Over the last 11 years, these fuzzers have found 6450 Firefox bugs, including 790 bugs that were rated as security-critical.

Really proactive sysadmins do try to run fuzzers and valgrind and do try to look for bugs rather than waiting for them to strike.

I'm forever bewildered by the seemingly unreasonable effectiveness of fuzzers at finding bugs.

It's not like fuzzers output exploit.sh or something.

It uses existing fuzzers out of the box.

On the other hand, we have all this software written in unsafe languages, but until afl came out we didn't have really effective, easy to use fuzzers.

There's a sort of malicious, "hacker"-like (in the pejorative sense) perception around useful security tools like fuzzers, password bruteforcers, port scanners, etc.

For awhile, a lot of them came from fuzzers; if you're interested in how that works, strong recommend for Zalewski's blogs on his open-source "american fuzzy lop" fuzzer.

I'm not sure if it's usually the mix of a "smart" C programmer writing a program that is patched by a "hobby" C programmer, or the fact that getting C right is just too hard -- or that people don't -Wall and don't run fuzzers and static checkers -- but whatever the reason, we keep seeing serious bugs in C programs.

> I'm not sure if it's usually the mix of a "smart" C programmer writing a program that is patched by a "hobby" C programmer, or the fact that getting C right is just too hard -- or that people don't -Wall and don't run fuzzers and static checkers -- but whatever the reason, we keep seeing serious bugs in C programs.

Fuzzers are great at finding bugs in parsers (and there are a surprising amount of parsers in the world, 90% of which should never have been written).