Visualizing and Understanding the Internals of Fuzzing

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Greybox fuzzing is one of the fuzzing techniques that has been extensively researched and used in practice. Plenty of publications propose improvements to greybox fuzzing. However, the extent to which these improvements really work and generalize is not yet understood: our preliminary study of the recent literature in grey-box fuzzing shows that most papers evaluate their fuzzers in terms of runtime code coverage or bug-finding capability, although the improvements made are to the internal components (or internals) of the fuzzer. Results drawn from such experiments are insufficient to judge the impact the changes in the fuzzer's internals have on its performance.