Towards Automated Discovery of Asymmetric Mempool DoS in Blockchains

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Wang, Yibo, Tang, Yuzhe, Li, Kai, Ding, Wanning, Yang, Zhihua
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Wang, Yibo
Tang, Yuzhe
Li, Kai
Ding, Wanning
Yang, Zhihua
author_facet Wang, Yibo
Tang, Yuzhe
Li, Kai
Ding, Wanning
Yang, Zhihua
contents In blockchains, mempool controls transaction flow before consensus, denial of whose service hurts the health and security of blockchain networks. This paper presents MPFUZZ, the first mempool fuzzer to find asymmetric DoS bugs by exploring the space of symbolized mempool states and optimistically estimating the promisingness of an intermediate state in reaching bug oracles. Compared to the baseline blockchain fuzzers, MPFUZZ achieves a > 100x speedup in finding known DETER exploits. Running MPFUZZ on major Ethereum clients leads to discovering new mempool vulnerabilities, which exhibit a wide variety of sophisticated patterns, including stealthy mempool eviction and mempool locking. Rule-based mitigation schemes are proposed against all newly discovered vulnerabilities.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2312_02642
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Towards Automated Discovery of Asymmetric Mempool DoS in Blockchains
Wang, Yibo
Tang, Yuzhe
Li, Kai
Ding, Wanning
Yang, Zhihua
Cryptography and Security
In blockchains, mempool controls transaction flow before consensus, denial of whose service hurts the health and security of blockchain networks. This paper presents MPFUZZ, the first mempool fuzzer to find asymmetric DoS bugs by exploring the space of symbolized mempool states and optimistically estimating the promisingness of an intermediate state in reaching bug oracles. Compared to the baseline blockchain fuzzers, MPFUZZ achieves a > 100x speedup in finding known DETER exploits. Running MPFUZZ on major Ethereum clients leads to discovering new mempool vulnerabilities, which exhibit a wide variety of sophisticated patterns, including stealthy mempool eviction and mempool locking. Rule-based mitigation schemes are proposed against all newly discovered vulnerabilities.
title Towards Automated Discovery of Asymmetric Mempool DoS in Blockchains
topic Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.02642