Distinguished Paper Award at OOPSLA 2023

We are delighted to announce that our paper "Randomized Testing of Byzantine Fault Tolerant Algorithms" by our students Levin N. Winter, Florena Buse, and Daan de Graaf, supervised by Burcu Kulahcioglu Ozkan (Software Technology, TU Delft), and Klaus von Gleissenthall (VU Amsterdam) received the “Distinguished Paper Award” at OOPSLA 2023. 

The paper presents ByzzFuzz, a new automated testing method for finding implementation errors in Byzantine fault-tolerant systems, such as blockchains. 

Although Byzantine fault-tolerant systems offer strong protection against faults and malicious attacks, it is hard to implement them correctly in practice. The developers of such systems may ignore unexpected, faulty situations while implementing the algorithms. Therefore, the implementations of
systems may not be fault tolerant despite the correctness of the protocol they implement. ByzzFuzz helps discover fault-tolerance bugs in simple test executions through automated randomized testing. 

ByzzFuzz discovered several bugs in the implementations of several Byzantine fault-tolerant systems, including a potential liveness violation in Tendermint, two vulnerabilities in the Ripple’s XRP Ledger Consensus Algorithm, and a  previously unknown bug in the production implementation of the XRP Ledger, which is fixed and awarded by Ripple's Bug Bounty program.

Read the full paper here.