Finding Consensus Bugs in Ethereum via Multi-transaction Differential Fuzzing

Ethereum is the second-largest blockchain platform next to Bitcoin. In the Ethereum network, decentralized Ethereum clients reach consensus through transitioning to the same blockchain states according to the Ethereum specification. Consensus bugs are bugs that make Ethereum clients transition to incorrect blockchain states and fail to reach consensus with other clients. Consensus bugs are extremely rare but can be exploited for network split and theft, which cause reliability and security-critical issues in the Ethereum ecosystem.

We describe Fluffy, a multi-transaction differential fuzzer for finding consensus bugs in Ethereum. First, Fluffy mutates and executes multi-transaction test cases to find consensus bugs which cannot be found using existing fuzzers for Ethereum. Second, Fluffy uses multiple existing Ethereum clients that independently implement the specification as cross-referencing oracles. Compared to a state-of-the-art fuzzer, Fluffy improves the fuzzing throughput by 510× and the code coverage by 2.7× with various optimizations: inprocess fuzzing, fuzzing harnesses for Ethereum clients, and semantic-aware mutation that reduces erroneous test cases.

Fluffy found two new consensus bugs in the most popular Geth Ethereum client which were exploitable on the live Ethereum mainnet. Four months after we reported the bugs to Geth developers, one of the bugs was triggered on the mainnet, and caused nodes using a stale version of Geth to hard fork the Ethereum blockchain. The blockchain community considers this hard fork the greatest challenge since the infamous 2016 DAO hack. We have made Fluffy publicly available at https://github.com/snuspl/fluffy to contribute to the security of Ethereum.