Quality-Assured Fuzz Harness Generation via the Four Principles Framework
For developers and security researchers, this work addresses the critical problem of ensuring harness correctness in automated fuzz testing, which is increasingly important with LLM-driven generation.
QuartetFuzz introduces the Four Principles framework for generating correct fuzz harnesses, achieving 29 confirmed bug reports (including 3 CVEs) with only 4.8% false positives across 23 projects, and identifying 53 violations in existing harnesses.
Fuzz testing is the dominant technique for finding memory-safety vulnerabilities in C/C++ software, yet its effectiveness hinges on the quality of fuzz harnesses -- the programs that bridge fuzzers and library APIs. A growing body of tools now automate harness generation, but none systematically ensures the correctness of produced harnesses: logic errors, API misuse, and lifecycle violations go undetected at the source level. As LLM-driven generation scales harness creation, uncontrolled quality turns scale into a liability. We present QuartetFuzz, an autonomous harness-generation system that systematically improves correctness throughout the generation process. At its core is the Four Principles framework -- Logic Correctness (P1), API Protocol Compliance (P2), Security Boundary Respect (P3), and Entry Point Adequacy (P4) -- the first source-level definition of harness correctness with mathematical specifications and implementable checks. We operationalize these principles in an autonomous LLM agent that produces harnesses satisfying P1-P4 through a generate-check-fix loop before any fuzzing begins. Deployed on 23 open-source projects spanning C/C++, Java, and JavaScript, the system submits 42 bug reports, of which 29 are fixed or confirmed upstream (including 3 CVEs) and only 2 are rejected (4.8% FP rate). During generation, the built-in P1/P2 checks automatically intercepted 58 harness-induced crashes that would otherwise have been false positives. Applied as a quality auditor to 586 existing production harnesses across 70 projects, the system identifies 53 violations (45 confirmed, 35 fixed). We release a dataset of 100 labeled harnesses for reproducible evaluation. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/OwenSanzas/QuartetFuzz