Go’s native fuzzing is useful, but it stands far behind state-of-the-art tooling that the Rust, C, and C++ ecosystems offer with LibAFL and AFL++. Path constraints are hard to solve. Structured inputs usually need handmade parsing. It doesn’t even detect several common bug classes, such as integer overflows, goroutine leaks, data races, and execution timeouts. So to make it better, we built gosentry, a fuzzing-oriented fork of the Go toolchain that keeps the standard testing.F workflow while using a stronger fuzzing stack underneath to tackle those issues.
With gosentry, go test -fuzz uses LibAFL by default. It can fuzz structs natively, run grammar-based fuzzing with Nautilus, detect bug classes that it couldn’t detect before, and create a fuzzing campaign coverage report in one command.
If you already have Go fuzz harnesses, you don’t need to rewrite them. Point them at gosentry’s binary and you get all of the above through the same go test -fuzz interface, with a few new flags:
./bin/go test -fuzz=FuzzHarness --focus-on-new-code=false --catch-races=true --catch-leaks=true
Figure 1: Basic gosentry usage
gosentry keeps the harness API and changes the engine and the surrounding tooling — you just tweak the CLI.
You can also generate coverage reports from an existing campaign with --generate-coverage. Run it from the same package with the same -fuzz target, and no corpus path is needed; gosentry stores the campaign state under Go’s fuzz cache index by package and fuzz target, so restarting the campaign resumes from the existing corpus.
We started this project after we released go-panikint to improve Go fuzzing’s integer overflow detection. We realized that integer overflow detection wasn’t enough. Go’s fuzzing ecosystem was still missing techniques that Rust, C, and C++ researchers already use every day.
We often faced these gaps in our own security work using Go’s vanilla fuzzer:
if branch, and the Go fuzzer could stay stuck forever.Gosentry keeps the parts Go developers already know:
testing.F, as usual.f.Add.f.Fuzz.Under the hood, gosentry captures the fuzz callback, builds a Go archive with libFuzzer-style entry points, and runs it in-process through a Rust-based LibAFL runner. The API stays familiar, but gosentry enhances the engine, scheduling, detectors, and much more.
We designed it this way to avoid friction for developers and security researchers adopting a new tool. Existing Go harnesses do not need to be ported to a new framework. And since the Go toolchain documentation and usage are already widely integrated into LLM pre-training datasets, an agent can easily use gosentry, as it is a fork of the Go toolchain.
Another added value of gosentry is its capacity to turn more bad behaviors into failures that the vanilla Go fuzzer wouldn’t report.
It includes compiler-inserted integer overflow checks by default and optional truncation checks through the go-panikint integration. It also lets you choose function calls that should stop the fuzzer. For example, you can use the --panic-on flag to stop fuzzing when log.Fatal is called. This flag is useful for codebases that log critical errors and keep going instead of panicking and reporting the bug to the user.
It can also catch data race issues using the native Go race detector (--catch-races), and goroutine leaks through its goleak integration (--catch-leaks). Finally, timeouts can be caught at fuzz-time to help detect issues like infinite loops.
Gosentry improves input quality in two different ways, which solve different problems.
Go’s native fuzzing accepts only a small set of parameter types, which doesn’t include composite types, such as structs, slices, arrays, and pointers. Gosentry supports fuzzing of these types.
type Input struct {
Data []byte
S string
N int
}
func FuzzStructInput(f *testing.F) {
f.Add(Input{Data: []byte("hello"), S: "world", N: 42})
f.Fuzz(func(t *testing.T, in Input) {
Process(in)
})
}
Figure 2: Supported gosentry harness with structured input
Under the hood, gosentry still mutates bytes. The difference is that it encodes and decodes the composite value for you in a proper way, so you don’t have to invent a custom wire format just to fuzz typed Go inputs.
In this mode, gosentry uses Nautilus to generate and mutate grammar-valid inputs while LibAFL still drives the coverage-guided loop.
Let’s imagine you want to fuzz a homemade JSON parser. Without a grammar, most of the time you would generate junk input that wouldn’t even pass the first branches. For example, the fuzzer would mutate {"postOfficeBox": 123} to {postOfficeBox"": """"&%}, while a more interesting generated input of postOfficeBox would be a much larger number like u64.MAX, giving {"postOfficeBox": 18446744073709551615}. In that case, you need grammar-based fuzzing. You define what the structure should be, and the fuzzer generates inputs accordingly. You could write a harness like this:
func FuzzGrammarJSON(f *testing.F) {
f.Add(`{"postOfficeBox":123}`)
f.Fuzz(func(t *testing.T, jsonInput string) {
ParseJSONFromString(jsonInput)
})
}
Figure 3: Grammar-based harness for our JSON parser
The grammar format is a JSON array of rules:
[
["Json", "\\{\"postOfficeBox\":{Number}\\}"],
["Number", "{Digit}"],
["Number", "{Digit}{Number}"],
["Digit", "0"],
["Digit", "1"],
["Digit", "2"],
["Digit", "3"],
["Digit", "4"],
["Digit", "5"],
["Digit", "6"],
["Digit", "7"],
["Digit", "8"],
["Digit", "9"]
]
Figure 4: Definition of our postOfficeBox JSON grammar
Just note that grammar mode still feeds bytes or strings to the harness. So your target needs to be able to parse either strings or bytes.
We’ve been running gosentry on a bunch of targets using grammar-based differential fuzzing campaigns and found a number of bugs. We have disclosed some of these issues to Optimism and Revm:
OutOfFunds does not bump nonce, leading to a state root mismatch against other clientsThose are exactly the kinds of bugs we wanted Go fuzzing to expose. They wouldn’t have been easy to find via the native Go fuzzer, but our grammar-based fuzzer via gosentry was able to easily detect them.
Now, see what you can find. If you already have a Go fuzz target, run it under gosentry and see what it can reach compared to the native Go fuzzer.
The project is available on GitHub and includes documentation for each feature described above.
If you’d like to read more about fuzzing, check out the following resources:
As always, contact us if you need help with your next Go project or fuzzing campaign.