Cross-Layer Fault Injection Testing For End-To-End Blockchain Resilience

Blockchain systems serve as the backbone of decentralized applications owing to their transparency, immutability, and faulttolerance. Nevertheless, existing reliability studies primarily analyze faults in isolation within individual layers, such as smartcontracts or network communication, without considering interdependencies across layers. Consequently, this limitation restrictsa comprehensive understanding of fault propagation in blockchain systems. In this work, we propose a cross-layer fault injectionframework to evaluate the end-to-end resilience of blockchain systems. The framework introduces controlled faults across theapplication, consensus, and network layers, thereby enabling systematic analysis of cascading failures and their impact on overallsystem behavior. We evaluate the proposed approach in a simulated blockchain environment under diverse fault scenarios,including contract-level vulnerabilities, consensus disruptions, and network latency variations. Experimental results demonstratethat cross-layer fault interactions significantly degrade system performance, leading to increased latency, higher fork rates, andreduced throughput. These findings highlight the importance of holistic fault analysis and show that cross-layer evaluationprovides deeper insights into blockchain robustness compared to traditional single-layer methods. Accordingly, the proposedframework contributes to designing more resilient blockchain architectures.