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Co-Founder & Chief Product Officer at Code Intelligence

Six Underappreciated Challenges Hindering the Adoption and Effectiveness of Fuzz Testing. When discussing fuzz testing, conversations often focus on the differences and advantages of various fuzzing engines, such as libFuzzer and AFL++. While these aspects are important, several frequently overlooked challenges significantly hinder the adoption of fuzz testing. 1️⃣ Selecting the Best Candidates to Fuzz: Especially in a large codebase, deciding which functions or APIs to test is crucial. Ideally, you start with a small set of public APIs that maximize fuzzing impact, such as code coverage and the number of bugs found. 2️⃣ Writing Realistic Fuzz Tests: Like unit tests, fuzz tests should respect the API contract and include necessary initialization and cleanup code. Incorrect API use can lead to false positives. 3️⃣ Maintaining Existing Fuzz Tests: As your code evolves, you should update your fuzz tests and keep them in sync with the code they test. 4️⃣ Ensuring High-Quality Fuzz Tests: High-quality fuzz tests achieve good code coverage by testing various ways an API is expected to be used. This increases the possibility of reaching good code coverage and consequently triggering more bugs. 5️⃣ Promptly Fixing Found Issues: When you start fuzzing a new project, there will be an initial burst of bugs. Often, these represent fuzzing blockers as the fuzzer will hit them over and over again, preventing it from further exploring your code. Generally, the faster you can fix bugs, the more effective the subsequent fuzzing runs become. 6️⃣ Integration into Developer Workflows: Seamlessly incorporating fuzz testing into CI/CD pipelines is key to continuous testing and quick feedback cycles, ensuring that fuzz testing is a routine part of development. By addressing these scalability challenges, you can unlock the full potential of fuzz testing and achieve its significant benefits. #fuzzing #softwaretesting #softwaresecurity

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