Initially released in November 2013, AFL[12] quickly became one of the most widely used fuzzers in security research. For many years after its release, AFL has been considered a "state of the art" fuzzer.[13] AFL is considered "a de-facto standard for fuzzing",[14] and the release of AFL contributed significantly to the development of fuzzing as a research area.[15] AFL is widely used in academia; academic fuzzers are often forks of AFL, and AFL is commonly used as a baseline to evaluate new techniques.[16][17]
^Fioraldi, Andrea; Maier, Dominik Christian; Zhang, Dongjia; Balzarotti, Davide (November 7, 2022). "LibAFL". Proceedings of the 2022 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security. CCS '22. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 1051–1065. doi:10.1145/3548606.3560602. ISBN978-1-4503-9450-5. S2CID253410747.. "The release of AFL marked an important milestone in the area of software security testing, revitalizing fuzzing as a major research topic".