Code Intelligence has introduced Spark, an AI test agent designed to autonomously detect bugs in unknown code without human interaction. According to the company, Spark stands out as the first AI agent to uncover a real-world vulnerability by independently generating and executing tests for popular open-source software.

Spark is designed to fully automate software testing, from identifying bugs early in the development process to their actual remediation, drastically lowering the entry barrier to advanced security testing technologies like white-box fuzz testing. When testing software, for a codebase with 100.000 lines of code, it saves up to 1.000 hours of manual effort.

During its final beta testing, Spark uncovered a vulnerability in WolfSSL, an open-source cryptography library widely used in developing embedded devices and IoT systems. The only human involvement was launching a single command to run the AI Test Agent; analyzing the code, generating a relevant test case, and running it was done autonomously. The vulnerability, a heap-based use-after-free, could lead to unexpected behavior, crashes, or security exploits. The WolfSSL team resolved the issue immediately and released a new version with the fix in late December 2024.

“The uncovered real-world vulnerability proves that AI can effectively take over manual tasks in software testing, such as analyzing code, identifying the most likely attack vectors, generating and running tests, and can thereby yield great results,” said Eric Brueggemann, CEO of Code Intelligence. “Next, we will focus on going even further by automatically fixing any uncovered bugs. This means the entire software testing process – from creating tests to bug remediation – will be completed in minutes without human interaction. However, humans will continue to make the final decisions. We will provide automatically generated pull requests with a proven fix.”

Code Intelligence will host an official launch event for its AI Test Agent on January 28, featuring security and software development experts from companies like Continental and Mozilla.