一句话：提出 APIDiffer，首个规范引导的以太坊客户端 API 差分测试框架，自动检测跨客户端实现不一致。
以太坊客户端 API 是用户与区块链交互的唯一接口，其实现普遍不一致，可能引发资金差错与网络可靠性风险；现有测试依赖人工与领域知识，难以跟上快速演进，也无法区分真 bug 与可接受差异。本文提出 APIDiffer，首个规范引导的以太坊客户端 API 差分测试框架：将 API 规范自动转化为测试套件，生成语法合法与非法的请求并注入实时链上数据，并用大语言模型做规范感知的误报过滤。在 11 个主流客户端上评估，共发现 72 个 bug，90.28% 已被确认或修复（含官方规范自身的严重错误），代码覆盖率较现有工具最高提升 89.67%，误报率降低 37.38%。
The Ethereum ecosystem, which secures over $381 billion in assets, fundamentally relies on client APIs as the sole interface between users and the blockchain. However, these critical APIs suffer from widespread implementation inconsistencies, which can lead to financial discrepancies, degraded user experiences, and threats to network reliability. Despite this criticality, existing testing approaches remain manual and incomplete: they require extensive domain expertise, struggle to keep pace with Ethereum’s rapid evolution, and fail to distinguish genuine bugs from acceptable implementation variations. We present APIDiffer , the first specification-guided differential testing framework designed to automatically detect API inconsistencies across Ethereum’s diverse client ecosystem. APIDiffer transforms API specifications into comprehensive test suites through two key innovations: (1) specification-guided test input generation that creates both syntactically valid and invalid requests enriched with real-time blockchain data, and (2) specification-aware false positive filtering that leverages large language models to distinguish genuine bugs from acceptable variations. Our evaluation across all 11 major Ethereum clients reveals the pervasiveness of API bugs in production systems. APIDiffer uncovered 72 bugs, with 90.28% already confirmed or fixed by developers, including one critical error in the official specifications themselves. Beyond these raw numbers, APIDiffer achieves up to 89.67% higher code coverage than existing tools and reduces false positive rates by 37.38%. The Ethereum community’s response validates our impact: developers have integrated our test cases, expressed interest in adopting our methodology, and escalated one bug to the official Ethereum Project Management meeting. By making APIDiffer open-source, we enable continuous validation of Ethereum client API implementations, thereby strengthening the foundational integrity of the entire Ethereum ecosystem.
@article{paperbot3831,
title = {When Specifications Meet Reality: Uncovering API Inconsistencies in Ethereum Infrastructure},
author = {Jie Ma and Ningyu He and Jinwen Xi and Mingzhe Xing and Liangxin Liu and Jiushenzi Luo and Xiaopeng Fu and Chiachih Wu and Haoyu Wang and Ying Gao and Yinliang Yue},
journal = {Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages},
volume = {10},
number = {OOPSLA1},
year = {2026},
doi = {10.1145/3798219}
}