An application has been through a peer review and regression testing and is prepared for release. A security engineer is asked to analyze an application binary to look for potential vulnerabilities…

A fuzzer automatically generates large volumes of unexpected, boundary-violating, or random input and feeds it to the application binary while monitoring for crashes, hangs, or memory corruption. This technique is specifically effective at discovering buffer overflows and input validation weaknesses in compiled binaries, which is precisely what led the engineer to recommend additional input sanitization.

An HTTP interceptor captures and modifies HTTP traffic between a client and server and is suited for web application testing, not for probing a compiled application binary for memory safety vulnerabilities.

A vulnerability scanner compares the application against a database of known CVEs and configuration weaknesses and does not generate the dynamic input conditions needed to trigger overflow vulnerabilities in a binary.

A SCAP scanner assesses system configuration and patch compliance against security benchmarks and is not designed to discover runtime input-handling vulnerabilities in application binaries.