Towards Smart Contract Fuzzing on GPUs

Fuzzing is one of the major techniques for uncovering vulnerabilities in smart contracts. The effectiveness of fuzzing is significantly affected by its throughput but unfortunately existing fuzzers for smart contracts have low throughput due to the slow execution of EVM, the delay introduced by the consensus protocols, the limited parallelization capability of CPUs, and the overhead caused by the instrumented EVM. To tackle this critical issue, in this paper, we take the first step to leverage GPU’s parallel computing power to boost the throughput of smart contract fuzzing. More precisely, by converting the fuzzing workload to a SIMD task, we can activate thousands of GPU cores to test the smart contract simultaneously. To achieve this purpose, we design new solutions to address three major challenges, namely developing incremental storage to reduce GPU memory cost, proposing a stateful bitmap to embed transaction dependency to the feedback metric, and designing a parallel feedback algorithm to rule out undesired seeds that cause redundant overlaps. We implement a prototype named Mau, which first transforms the bytecode of a smart contract to a SIMD application in PTX assembly and then runs it parallelly on the GPU. We evaluate Mau using both a large and small benchmark. The experimental results demonstrate that the throughput of Mau reaches 162.37K execs/sec and 328.06K execs/sec, which leads to an 8.69-15.38X improvement to the state-of-the-art tool. Moreover, the high throughput empowers Mau to detect 1.01-2.50X more bugs and obtain 1.03–4.71X more code coverage than baselines.