Binary Coverage the Wrong Way
The article discusses the history and evolution of fuzz testing, a method of testing programs by generating random inputs to identify bugs. The author explains how American Fuzzy Lop revolutionized the field by introducing coverage-guided fuzzing, which provides feedback on code coverage. This approach has been improved upon with tools like AFL++ and Intel PT, but the author notes that using AMD processors poses challenges due to their poorly documented and slower performance counting features.
- ▪Fuzz testing involves generating random inputs to test programs for bugs.
- ▪American Fuzzy Lop introduced coverage-guided fuzzing, which provides feedback on code coverage.
- ▪Intel PT is a hardware-based approach to collecting coverage information, but it is only available on Intel processors.
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Jul 3, 2026 • Charlie Binary Coverage the Wrong Way The Right Way Way back in the age of the dinosaurs, if you wrote a program and wanted to test that it was correct, you mostly had two choices: you could either manually construct malformed inputs and try them in succession, or hook up a program which would randomly generate inputs and try them automatically 1. Those programs were called fuzzers, or sometimes generators, and this was “fuzz testing”. It also for quite a long time wasn’t very good: the generator would have no feedback from the program under test except “did this random input crash or not”.
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