Towards Understanding the Bugs in Solidity Compiler

TL;DR

This paper systematically analyzes 533 bugs in the Solidity compiler, revealing their characteristics and limitations of current fuzzers, to improve understanding and detection of compiler bugs in smart contract development.

Contribution

First comprehensive study of Solidity compiler bugs, including their traits, root causes, and testing challenges, providing insights for future bug detection improvements.

Findings

Fuzzers are ineffective in detecting Solidity compiler bugs.

Seven key bug-revealing insights identified for Solidity compiler.

Bug detection is hindered by unconsidered features and flags.

Abstract

Solidity compiler plays a key role in enabling the development of smart contract applications on Ethereum by governing the syntax of a domain-specific language called Solidity and performing compilation and optimization of Solidity code. The correctness of Solidity compiler is critical in fostering transparency, efficiency, and trust in industries reliant on smart contracts. However, like other software systems, Solidity compiler is prone to bugs, which may produce incorrect bytecodes on blockchain platforms, resulting in severe security concerns. As a domain-specific compiler for smart contracts, Solidity compiler differs from other compilers in many perspectives, posing unique challenges to detect its bugs. To understand the bugs in Solidity compiler and benefit future research, in this paper, we present the first systematic study on 533 Solidity compiler bugs. We carefully examined their characteristics (including symptoms, root causes, and distribution), and their triggering test cases. Our study leads to seven bug-revealing takeaways for Solidity compiler. Moreover, to study the limitations of Solidity compiler fuzzers and bring our findings into practical scenarios, we evaluate three Solidity compiler fuzzers on our constructed benchmark. The results show that these fuzzers are inefficient in detecting Solidity compiler bugs. The inefficiency arises from their failure to consider the interesting bug-inducing features, bug-related compilation flags, and test oracles