Fuzz Testing

Fuzz testing

A parser trusts its input more than it should. Your cases cover the shapes you imagined; the crash lives in the ones you did not: the length prefix that lies, the header truncated mid-field, the structure nested past every buffer. A coverage-guided fuzzer mutates bytes and follows the branches they open, reaching states no hand-written test would ever assemble. The work is seeding a good corpus and turning crashes into fixed bugs.

Method

1. Write a harness that maps a byte buffer to one entry point. Expose a single target that feeds raw bytes straight to the parser: fuzz_target! for cargo-fuzz, f.Fuzz(func(t, b []byte)) in Go, or TestOneInput under Atheris. Keep it deterministic and free of global state so any crash reproduces from the input alone.
2. Build with sanitizers so silent corruption becomes a crash. Compile with -fsanitize=address,undefined; without AddressSanitizer a heap overflow can pass unnoticed and return quietly wrong output the fuzzer never flags.
3. Seed the corpus with real, valid samples. Drop a genuine PNG, a captured protocol frame, or a known-good document into the corpus directory. The mutator needs valid structure to work from, and a -dict= of magic bytes carries it past format gates it would never guess.
4. Add a round-trip or grammar oracle where mutation stalls. Assert that parse(serialize(parse(x))) is stable, or generate through a grammar or protobuf mutator, so inputs stay near-valid and exercise deep semantics instead of tripping the checksum at the top.
5. Triage each crash to one root cause. A single bug spawns many crashing inputs. Minimize with -minimize_crash or cargo fuzz tmin, then group by the top sanitizer frame, and fix per distinct defect rather than per file.
6. Commit the minimized reproducer as a regression seed. Save the reduced bytes into the corpus and a unit test so the fixed crash runs on every build. Keep long mutation campaigns in a nightly or OSS-Fuzz stage, not the per-commit suite.

Checks

• Does a fresh crash reproduce from the saved input with no fuzzer running?
• Do the corpus seeds parse cleanly, giving the mutator real structure to work?
• Are sanitizers on in the fuzz build, so an out-of-bounds read fails loudly?

Boundaries

Fuzzing finds crashes, hangs, and memory errors, not logic bugs where the process survives but the answer is wrong; pair it with property-based-testing for those. It suits code that eats untrusted or complex input: decoders, deserializers, protocol handlers. Business logic with a narrow typed input space rarely repays the harness.