the.com/fuzz
Breaking software on purpose, faster than any user could, to find the cracks first.
means To bombard a program with huge volumes of random, malformed, or unexpected input to see what makes it crash or misbehave — exposing bugs before real users (or attackers) do.
from The computing sense dates to 1988, when Barton Miller's class at the University of Wisconsin fed random input to Unix utilities over a noisy dial-up line and found many crashed. It borrows the older English 'fuzz' (soft, indistinct fluff) for deliberately garbled data.
- method
- throws random or malformed inputs at programs
- origin
- coined at Wisconsin, 1988, testing unix utilities
- famous win
- found bugs crashing a third of unix tools
- modern use
- powers google and microsoft's automated bug hunts