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rust-fuzz / book

📖 Guides and tutorials on how to fuzz Rust code
https://rust-fuzz.github.io/book/
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Does AFL really run until quit? #16

Open 8573 opened 5 years ago

8573 commented 5 years ago

The last sentence of §2.2, the AFL.rs tutorial, is—

AFL will run indefinitely, so if you want to quit, press CTRL-C.

However, http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/afl/README.txt mentions that AFL has a "default timeout":

You can use -t and -m to override the default timeout and memory limit for the executed process; rare examples of targets that may need these settings touched include compilers and video decoders.

Is this inconsistent with the sentence quoted above from the Rust Fuzz Book, or am I misunderstanding what "default timeout" means?

frewsxcv commented 5 years ago

My understanding is that the timeout is for a test run for a single generated input. As opposed the to total lifespan of the fuzzer which will test an indefinite number of generated inputs