Towards Automatic Discovery of Denial of Service Weaknesses in Blockchain Resource Models

Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks at the execution layer represent one of the most severe threats to blockchain systems, compromising availability by depleting the resources of victims. To counteract these attacks, many blockchains have implemented unique resource models that incorporate transaction fees. Nevertheless, historical incidents of DoS attacks demonstrate that these resource model designs remain inadequate. Although there are studies that manually craft DoS attacks on specific blockchains in isolation, none of them can discover DoS weaknesses in blockchains automatically. In this paper, we provide an insight into DoS weaknesses in blockchain resource models, and present a generic and systematic approach to uncover these weaknesses. In our approach, we first identify DoS weaknesses by DoSVER, a novel tool that reasons feasible DoS weaknesses against blockchain resource models by formal verification. The identified DoS weaknesses will be further validated by DoSDET, a new framework that automates the attack synthesis in exploiting the identified DoS weaknesses. We conduct a comprehensive and systematic evaluation by extensive experiments on nine diverse and widely-used blockchains, and discovered 12 DoS weaknesses with corresponding exploitation across the nine blockchains, 10 of which were unveiled for the first time. CCS Concepts • Security and privacy → Distributed systems security.