Re: [TUHS] [tuhs] fuzz testing of Unix-family utilities

I first encountered the fuzz-testing work of Barton Miller (Computer Sciences Department, University of Wisconsin in Madison) and his students and colleagues in their original paper on the subject An empirical study of the reliability of UNIX utilities Comm. ACM 33(12) 32--44 (December 1990) https://doi.org/10.1145/96267.96279 which was followed by Fuzz Revisited: A Re-examination of the Reliability of UNIX Utilities and Services University of Wisconsin CS TR 1264 (18 February 1995) ftp://ftp.cs.wisc.edu/pub/techreports/1995/TR1268.pdf and An Empirical Study of the Robustness of MacOS Applications Using Random Testing ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review 41(1) 78--86 (January 2007) https://doi.org/10.1145/1228291.1228308 I have used their techniques and tools many times in testing my own, and other, software. By chance, I found today in Web searches on another subject that Milller's group has a new paper in press in the journal IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering: The Relevance of Classic Fuzz Testing: Have We Solved This One? https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2020.3047766 https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.06537 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9309406 I track that journal at http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/ieeetranssoftwengYYYY.{bib,html} [YYYY = 1970 to 2020, by decade], but the new paper has not yet been assigned a journal issue, so I had not seen it before today. The Miller group work over 33 years has examined the reliability of common Unix tools in the face of unexpected input, and in the original work that began in 1988, they were able to demonstrate a significant failure rate in common, and widely used, Unix-family utilities. Despite wide publicity of their first paper, things have not got much better, even from reprogramming software tools in `safe' languages, such as Rust. In each paper, they analyze the reasons for the exposed bugs, and sadly, much the same reasons still exist in their latest study, and in several cases, have been introduced into code since their first work. The latest paper also contains mention of Plan 9, which moved bug-prone input line editing into the window system, and of bugs in pdftex (they say latex, but I suspect they mean pdflatex, not latex itself: pdflatex is a macro-package enhanced layer over the pdftex engine, which is a modified TeX engine). The latter are significant to me and my friends and colleagues in the TeX community, and for the TeX Live 2021 production team http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/texlive-utah/ especially because this year, Don Knuth revisited TeX and Metafont, produced new bug-fixed versions of both, plus updated anniversary editions of his five-volume Computers & Typesetting book series. His recent work is described in a new paper announced this morning: The \TeX{} tuneup of 2021 TUGboat 42(1) ??--?? February 2021 https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb42-1/tb130knuth-tuneup21.pdf Perhaps one or more list members might enjoy the exercise of applying the Barton-group fuzz tests (all of which are available from a Web site ftp://ftp.cs.wisc.edu/paradyn/fuzz/fuzz-2020/ as discussed in their paper) to 1970s and 1980s vintage Unix systems that they run on software-simulated CPUs (or rarely, on real vintage hardware). The Unix tools of those decades were generally much smaller (in lines of code), and most were written by the expert Unix pioneers at Bell Labs. It would of interest to compare the tool failure rates in vintage Unix with tool versions offered by commercial distributions, the GNU Project, and the FreeBSD community, all of which are treated in the 2021 paper. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - Nelson H. F. Beebe Tel: +1 801 581 5254 - - University of Utah FAX: +1 801 581 4148 - - Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB Internet e-mail: beebe(a)math.utah.edu - - 155 S 1400 E RM 233 beebe(a)acm.org beebe(a)computer.org - - Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ - -------------------------------------------------------------------------------