Knocking at the Door: Fuzzing libpq and PgBouncer / Adam Wolk

Fuzzing is a simple but powerful technique for discovering edge-case bugs in large, stateful systems like PostgreSQL. This talk shows how to apply it to Postgres’ client library libpq and commonly used connection pooler PgBouncer - both handle every network connection before the server sees a query. We’ll walk through building minimal harnesses, generating and mutating protocol inputs, and reasoning about what makes fuzzing effective on complex C codebases. The session is meant as a practical guide: how to start fuzzing a Postgres-related project, what challenges to expect, and what kind of issues you can realistically uncover along the way.