Software is everywhere, powering the planes we fly, the cars we drive, the medical devices keeping us alive, and the financial systems managing our money. As software has become the backbone of modern life, the consequences of vulnerabilities within it have never been higher. Yet many organizations still rely on security testing approaches that only find what they already know to look for.
That’s the gap fuzz testing was built to close. Fuzzing is a dynamic security testing technique that goes beyond known vulnerabilities and common attack patterns. Instead of checking boxes against a list of CVEs, fuzz testing throws unexpected, malformed, and random inputs at software to uncover the unknown weaknesses that traditional tools miss—the kind that sophisticated attackers actively seek out and exploit.
Once the exclusive domain of elite security researchers, fuzzing has matured dramatically. Today, developers, security teams, and test engineers can integrate fuzzing into their workflows without deep specialized expertise. The tooling has caught up to the need.
This ebook is your guide to understanding fuzz testing from the ground up: what it is, how it works, where it fits alongside other security techniques like penetration testing and bug bounty programs, which industries need it most, and what regulations are beginning to require it. Whether you’re a developer looking to write your first fuzz harness, a security professional building out a testing program, or a business leader trying to understand your organization’s risk exposure, this guide will give you the foundation to make informed decisions.
Fuzz testing, otherwise known as fuzzing, is a DAST (Dynamic Application Security Testing) technique for negative testing. Fuzzing aims to detect known, unknown, and zero-day vulnerabilities.
A fuzzing tool can be used to create a test case and send malformed or random inputs to fuzz targets. Their objective is to trigger bad behaviors, such as crashes, infinite loops, and/or memory leaks. These anomalous behaviors are often a sign of an underlying security vulnerability.
Ten years ago, fuzzing could only be conducted by security experts, but the technology has matured to the point that even novice developers can get up to speed quickly. Test and evaluation teams that have a basic understanding of Linux can also use fuzzers.
Fuzz testing should be a part of every SDLC. Fuzzing tools look at the runtime behavior of the code and provide more code coverage than SAST or SCA.
Fuzzers send malformed inputs to targets. Their objective is to trigger bad behaviors, such as crashes, infinite loops, and/or memory leaks. These anomalous behaviors are often a sign of an underlying vulnerability.
A seed corpus is a set of valid inputs that serve as a starting point for fuzzing a target.
In order to fuzz test, a fuzzer needs a way to interact with the application. Unit tests and integration tests both typically involve running the software under test with a specific input and asserting that a specific output was observed.
Fuzzing extends this form of testing by parameterizing the test within an array of bytes and then searching for strings of input bytes that trigger bugs. Fortunately, developers can write a fuzz test harness in much less time than required to write individual unit tests. Better yet, these harnesses typically only need to be written once for a given application.
The rise in fuzzing has resulted in security vulnerabilities getting found and fixed at an amazing rate. But it has raised some new questions: how do we find good fuzz targets quickly, and what is left to fuzz? These questions require tools and workflows that remain uncommon among software developers and security researchers alike, and one potential solution is in automated coverage analysis.
Automated Coverage Analysis—also known as Code Coverage Analysis or Test Coverage Analysis—is a process used in software testing to measure how much of the code is exercised by the test cases. It automatically checks which parts of the program’s source code have been executed during testing, helping developers identify areas that need more testing and ensuring better software quality.
Fuzz testing is a technique that has been around for nearly four decades. With each generation of fuzzing software, we’re seeing evolution at play, adapting to the needs of its time. Below are a few different types of fuzzing tools that have emerged over the years.
Random fuzzing is sending random inputs to an application. There is no systematic method with a mutation fuzzer, so the inputs of this random testing might not even penetrate the applications! This is sometimes compared with monkeys typing on a keyboard.
Grammar-based fuzzers rely on a template that’s manually generated. It informs the fuzzing engine how to generate each input. Typically, the individuals creating these templates have an understanding of how the protocol is built, so there is intelligence around how those inputs are generated. However, these templates can inadvertently constrain the areas of the applications to explore and take a one-size-fits-all approach.
Guided fuzzers rely solely on their target application’s behavior to inform how to generate inputs. For example, the fuzzing engine will generate an input, observe how the application behaves, learn from it, then generate the next input. These fuzzers are most effective because they custom generate tests specific to the applications.
Fuzz testing is relevant across many different industries like aerospace, defense, automotive, healthcare, financial services, telecommunications, cloud and infrastructure, firmware, and software and SaaS.
Industries should prioritize fuzz testing when they have any of these characteristics:
In many cases, there are regulations that require fuzz testing in certain industries. For example, ED-203A requires any entity involved in aviation to ensure aircraft systems are safe from cyber threats. ED-203A requires organizations to meet a new standard—refutation—which requires them to show the presence or absence of a vulnerability in a test scenario.
Another example is the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) in the EU, which requires financial entities to conduct advanced threat-led penetration testing. This includes vulnerability testing of critical systems where fuzz testing is an expected component.
For medical devices, the FDA Cybersecurity Guidance explicitly lists fuzz testing as an expected security testing method for premarket submissions.
A review of software security investments reveals that a majority of spending is in application testing solutions, such as static analysis, software composition analysis, and scanners. These conventional testing approaches, however, test known or common attack patterns, only addressing CVEs or CWEs. But what about the unknown vulnerabilities—the weaknesses malicious hackers often exploit?
DAST solutions that use fuzzing are proven to maximize defect detection with the least amount of time and resources. As a result, these tools not only buy organizations time and money, but also free scarce technical resources from manual, mundane tasks and allow them to focus on strategic initiatives that require true expertise.
You may have invested quite a bit of time, money, and effort into your SAST solution. So, you may not be warm to the idea of breaking up with it. Great news! You don’t have to.
When it comes to product security, best practices call for layering. Much like defense-in-depth, consider it like testing-in-depth. Assess the gaps left behind by your SAST solution, then identify additional solutions for augmentation.
In 2025, Bugcrowd acquired Mayhem Security, a leading provider of offensive security built on the tried-and-true methods of coverage guided fuzzing by combining it with the ingenuity of symbolic execution. Symbolic execution has the capability to mathematically reason for conditional functions within code, allowing the guided fuzzer to efficiently reach deeper into software. Its systematic and thorough approach enables Mayhem to uncover at least 25% more defects than using coverage guided fuzzing alone.
As Mayhem Security by Bugcrowd traverses through software, it’s capable of obtaining knowledge of its software-under-test (SUT) over time. It takes in feedback from its targets to influence the autonomous generation of future test cases, increasing the likelihood of uncovering deeper defects. This approach offers scalability advantages over manual penetration testing efforts and enables both security and development teams to spend less time on tedious vulnerability management efforts.
“Symbolic execution” usually means “static symbolic execution”, in which you analyze a non-executing program to consider how it might behave when it does execute for real. Symbolic execution is a program analysis technique that uses formal computer science methods to determine an input that triggers a node in the application to execute. Once determined, the valid input is used to derive invalid inputs for negative testing.
Concolic execution is a form of dynamic symbolic execution and a type of analysis that runs on a trace of a program that ran (for real) on a specific input.
Mayhem Security by Bugcrowd technically only does concolic execution, not static symbolic execution. We don’t do static symbolic execution, which is what someone might mean when they say “symbolic execution”. When we say it, we mean in the more general sense of “static or dynamic symbolic execution”, of which we do one of those things.
Fuzz testing is an excellent complement to a bug bounty program. Fuzz testing feeds bug bounties, and bug bounties improve fuzzing strategy. Security teams benefit from coverage at scale and vulnerability class intelligence when combining these two tactics.
Pen testing and fuzz testing are also a strong pairing. While fuzz testing is automated with a wide breadth and shallow reasoning, pen testing is more goal-oriented that finds flaws deep within the system, such as chained exploits and logic flaws.
Hackers aren’t waiting, so why should you? See how Bugcrowd can quickly improve your security posture.