Chaos Engineering of Ethereum Blockchain Clients

TL;DR

This paper introduces ChaosETH, a chaos engineering framework that tests Ethereum blockchain clients' resilience by injecting system call errors and analyzing their behavior, revealing diverse resilience characteristics.

Contribution

It presents the first application of chaos engineering to blockchain clients, systematically evaluating their resilience to system call errors.

Findings

Ethereum clients show varied resilience to system call errors.

Chaos engineering can effectively assess blockchain system robustness.

Some clients exhibit full resilience, others crash or behave unpredictably.

Abstract

In this paper, we present ChaosETH, a chaos engineering approach for resilience assessment of Ethereum blockchain clients. ChaosETH operates in the following manner: First, it monitors Ethereum clients to determine their normal behavior. Then, it injects system call invocation errors into one single Ethereum client at a time, and observes the behavior resulting from perturbation. Finally, ChaosETH compares the behavior recorded before, during, and after perturbation to assess the impact of the injected system call invocation errors. The experiments are performed on the two most popular Ethereum client implementations: GoEthereum and Nethermind. We assess the impact of 22 different system call errors on those Ethereum clients with respect to 15 application-level metrics. Our results reveal a broad spectrum of resilience characteristics of Ethereum clients w.r.t. system call invocation errors, ranging from direct crashes to full resilience. The experiments clearly demonstrate the feasibility of applying chaos engineering principles to blockchain systems.