History
The term "fuzz" or "fuzzing" originates from a 1988 class project at the University of Wisconsin, taught by Professor Barton Miller. The assignment was titled "Operating System Utility Program Reliability - The Fuzz Generator". The project developed a basic command-line fuzzer to test the reliability of Unix programs by bombarding them with random data until they crashed. The test was repeated in 1995, expanded to include testing of GUI-based tools (X Window), network protocols, and system library APIs. Follow-on work included testing command- and GUI-based applications on both Windows and MacOS X.
One of the earliest examples of fuzzing dates from before 1983. "The Monkey" was a Macintosh application developed by Steve Capps prior to 1983. It used journaling hooks to feed random events into Mac programs, and was used to test for bugs in MacPaint.
Another early fuzz testing tool was crashme, first released in 1991, which was intended to test the robustness of Unix and Unix-like operating systems by executing random machine instructions.
Read more about this topic: Fuzz Testing
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