[TUHS] Re: A fuzzy awk.

[Rob Pike <robpike@gmail.com>]

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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
>
>
>

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