{"ID":2848664,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.25665","arxiv_id":"2510.25665","title":"Fuzz Smarter, Not Harder: Towards Greener Fuzzing with GreenAFL","abstract":"Fuzzing has become a key search-based technique for software testing, but continuous fuzzing campaigns consume substantial computational resources and generate significant carbon footprints. Existing grey-box fuzzing approaches like AFL++ focus primarily on coverage maximisation, without considering the energy costs of exploring different execution paths. This paper presents GreenAFL, an energy-aware framework that incorporates power consumption into the fuzzing heuristics to reduce the environmental impact of automated testing whilst maintaining coverage. GreenAFL introduces two key modifications to traditional fuzzing workflows: energy-aware corpus minimisation considering power consumption when reducing initial corpora, and energy-guided heuristics that direct mutation towards high-coverage, low-energy inputs. We conduct an ablation study comparing vanilla AFL++, energy-based corpus minimisation, and energy-based heuristics to evaluate the individual contributions of each component. Results show that highest coverage, and lowest energy usage is achieved whenever at least one of our modifications is used.","short_abstract":"Fuzzing has become a key search-based technique for software testing, but continuous fuzzing campaigns consume substantial computational resources and generate significant carbon footprints. Existing grey-box fuzzing approaches like AFL++ focus primarily on coverage maximisation, without considering the energy costs of...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.25665","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.25665v1","authors":"[\"Ayse Irmak Ercevik\",\"Aidan Dakhama\",\"Melane Navaratnarajah\",\"Yazhuo Cao\",\"Leo Fernandes\"]","published":"2025-10-29T16:28:50Z","proceeding":"cs.SE","tasks":"[\"cs.SE\"]","methods":"[]","has_code":false}