FUZZING 2025

The 4th International Fuzzing Workshop (FUZZING) 2025 welcomes all researchers, scientists, engineers and practitioners to present their latest research findings, empirical analyses, techniques, and applications in the area of fuzzing and software testing for automated bug finding. This year, the workshop will feature multiple interleaved tracks: a main track for pre-registered reports of research papers and a fuzzing nuggets track for short papers.

Please see the workshop website for more details about tracks, including the original CFP: https://fuzzingworkshop.github.io/

Keynote Speakers

Will Wilson, CEO and Co-Founder of Antithesis

Title: Are you sure you belong in academia?

Abstract: I too once lived in an ivory tower, pondering the deepest mysteries of the universe (in my occasional snatches of spare time between writing grant proposals and fighting with IRBs). Then I quit and went into industry instead. To my surprise, there was interesting research happening there. I was still able to ponder the mysteries of creation, and I was better paid, and there were no IRBs.

Is the modern research university a path dependent outcome, or is it what we’d come up with if we were designing from scratch? What are the pros and cons of an endowed chair vs. a sinecure at FAANG? Is being surrounded by credentialed colleagues pursuing the same questions as you less important in the age of the internet, or more? Do crass financial incentives ruin the integrity of the scientific process? Is industry still a place where you can do deep, foundational work?

As computer scientists, two career paths stretch out in front of us. How can you tell which one you belong on? Come to this talk and find out. You will also learn about the secret third career path for CS theorists, and the even more secret fourth one.

Biography: Will Wilson is a failed mathematician who switched to programming because it seemed easier. He built distributed databases at FoundationDB, Apple, and Google. Along the way, he realized that computers are actually the enemy, and founded Antithesis to put them in their place.

Miryung Kim, Professor at UCLA

Title: Constraining Fuzzing without Paying Too Much

Abstract: Fuzzing currently has two flavors—an existing generic, domain-agnostic, solution such as AFL, or developers often build a custom generator such as “X”-Smith that is more effective for a specialized domain such as C, SQL, and MLIR. However, constructing a custom fuzzer such as “X”-Smith generally requires significant developer or engineering effort, measured in person-months.

In this talk, I will reflect on my group’s experience of designing custom fuzzers for data-intensive computing and heterogeneous hardware domains. I will discuss how we had to encode domain-specific constraints, custom feedback guidance, custom search strategies, and custom mutation operators to make the fuzzing solutions effective for a specialized domain. Then, reflecting on this manual specialization effort, I will propose a new direction on how we should strive to bootstrap a custom fuzzer, automatically or semi-automatically, without too much manual effort.

Toward this vision of “bootstrapping a custom fuzzer without paying too much”, I will share several ongoing effort to find the right balance between the universality of a fuzzer and its effectiveness in a specialized domain: (1) custom mutation synthesis from examples, (2) automated grammar refinement to constrain fuzzing, (3) LLM-guided constraint-generation for mutation, and (4) a lightweight DSL for context-guided input generation.

Biography: Miryung Kim is a Professor and Vice Chair of Graduate Studies in Computer Science at UCLA. Her research group focuses on software engineering for AI, big data, and hardware heterogeneity. She has mentored seven PhD students and postdocs who have gone on to become professors (at Columbia, Purdue, and two at Virginia Tech, among others). For her impact on nurturing the next generation of academics, she received the ACM SIGSOFT Influential Educator Award. She served as Program Co-Chair of the ACM International Conference on Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE 2022). She was a Keynote Speaker at ASE 2019 and ISSTA 2022 and has given Distinguished Lectures at CMU, UIUC, and other institutions. She is an Amazon Scholar at Amazon Web Services.