Power Schedules¶

Now we introduce a new concept; the power schedule. A power schedule distributes the precious fuzzing time among the seeds in the population. Our objective is to maximize the time spent fuzzing those (most progressive) seeds which lead to higher coverage increase in shorter time.

We call the likelihood with which a seed is chosen from the population as the seed's energy. Throughout a fuzzing campaign, we would like to prioritize seeds that are more promising. Simply said, we do not want to waste energy fuzzing non-progressive seeds. We call the procedure that decides a seed's energy as the fuzzer's power schedule. For instance, AFL's schedule assigns more energy to seeds that are shorter, that execute faster, and yield coverage increases more often.