Bounded Exhaustive Random Program Generation for Testing Solidity Compilers

By July 2025, smart contracts collectively manage roughly $120 billion in assets. With Solidity remaining the dominant language for smart contract development, the correctness of Solidity compilers has become critically important. However, Solidity compilers are prone to bugs, with a recent study revealing that combinations of qualifiers in Solidity programs are the primary cause of compiler crashes, accounting for 40.5% of all historical crashes. While random program generators are widely used for compiler testing, they may be less effective at finding Solidity compiler bugs because they explore the unbounded space of possible programs rather than concentrating on the specific subspace related to bug-prone qualifiers. A promising idea for finding qualifier-related bugs is to bound the search space based on empirical evidence of where such bugs are likely to occur, specifically focusing test generation to target subspaces with rich combinations of qualifiers. To address this, we propose bounded exhaustive random program generation, a novel approach that dynamically bounds the search space, enhancing the likelihood of uncovering Solidity compiler bugs. Specifically, our method bounds the search space by generating valid program templates that abstract programs that use bug-prone qualifiers, and then uses these templates as a basis for compiler testing through exhaustive enumeration of suitable qualifiers. Mechanisms are devised to address technical challenges regarding validity and efficiency.

We have implemented our novel generation approach in a new tool, Erwin. We have used Erwin to find and report 26 bugs across two Solidity compilers, solc and solang, and one Solidity static analyzer, slither. Among these, 23 were previously unknown, 18 have been confirmed, and 10 have been fixed. Evaluation results demonstrate that Erwin outperforms state-of-the-art Solidity fuzzers in bug detection and complements developer-written test * This work was completed during Haoyang's visit to the FastPL group at Imperial College London led by Prof. Alastair F. Donaldson.