SWAMP’s Link to the Development of Fuzzing
The SWAMP’s Chief Scientist, Bart Miller, was recently interviewed by Andy Greenberg at WIRED regarding his role in the development of fuzzing. “In the world of cybersecurity, fuzzing is the usually automated process of finding hackable software bugs by randomly feeding different permutations of data into a target program until one of those permutations reveals a vulnerability.”
At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Miller and a group of students “created the first purpose-built fuzzing tool to try to exploit that method of haphazardly stumbling into security flaws.” At the time, their paper and methods were criticized, but according to Miller, “Today, if you’re a hacker trying to crack a system, the first thing you do is fuzz test it.”
