[TUHS] Re: A fuzzy awk.

[Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com>]

I think the title might go to my OS prof, Bart Miller.  He did a paper 

https://www.paradyn.org/papers/fuzz.pdf

that named it that in 1990.  

On Tue, May 21, 2024 at 11:56:30AM +1000, Rob Pike wrote:
> Ron Hardin was doing this to Dennis's C compiler in the 1980s, well before
> 1998. And I believe Doug McIlroy was generating random regular expressions
> to compare different implementations. It's probably impossible to decide
> who invented fuzzing, so the credit will surely go to the person who named
> it.
> 
> -rob
> 
> 
> On Tue, May 21, 2024 at 12:09???AM Serissa <stewart@serissa.com> wrote:
> 
> > Well this is obviously a hot button topic.  AFAIK I was nearby when
> > fuzz-testing for software was invented. I was the main advocate for hiring
> > Andy Payne into the Digital Cambridge Research Lab.  One of his little
> > projects was a thing that generated random but correct C programs and fed
> > them to different compilers or compilers with different switches to see if
> > they crashed or generated incorrect results.  Overnight, his tester filed
> > 300 or so bug reports against the Digital C compiler.  This was met with
> > substantial pushback, but it was a mostly an issue that many of the reports
> > traced to the same underlying bugs.
> >
> > Bill McKeemon expanded the technique and published "Differential Testing
> > of Software"
> > https://www.cs.swarthmore.edu/~bylvisa1/cs97/f13/Papers/DifferentialTestingForSoftware.pdf
> >
> > Andy had encountered the underlying idea while working as an intern on the
> > Alpha processor development team.  Among many other testers, they used an
> > architectural tester called REX to generate more or less random sequences
> > of instructions, which were then run through different simulation chains
> > (functional, RTL, cycle-accurate) to see if they did the same thing.
> > Finding user-accessible bugs in hardware seems like a good thing.
> >
> > The point of generating correct programs (mentioned under the term LangSec
> > here) goes a long way to avoid irritating the maintainers.  Making the test
> > cases short is also maintainer-friendly.  The test generator is also in a
> > position to annotate the source with exactly what it is supposed to do,
> > which is also helpful.
> >
> > -L
> >
> >
> >

-- 
---
Larry McVoy           Retired to fishing          http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat