People can have different definitions and still communicate usefully, and I think there is not 100% agreement on the exact boundaries between the two.

That said, for me: they are distinct but related, and that distinction is useful.

For example, Hypothesis[1] is a popular property testing framework. The authors have more recently created HypoFuzz[2], which includes this sentence in the introduction:

“HypoFuzz runs your property-based test suite, using cutting-edge fuzzing techniques and coverage instrumentation to find even the rarest inputs which trigger an error.”

Being able to talk about fuzzing and property testing as distinct things seems useful — saying something like “We added fuzzing techniques to our property testing framework” is more meaningful than “We added property testing techniques to our property testing framework” ;-)

My personal hope is there will be more convergence, and work to add convenient first-class fuzzing support in a popular language like Go will hopefully help move the primary use case for fuzzing to be about correctness, with security moving to an important but secondary use case.

[1] https://hypothesis.works

[2] https://hypofuzz.com