Speaker
Description
The Lightning Network moves real money over four independent implementations -LND, Core Lightning, LDK, and Eclair. A protocol bug in any of them is a security bug, so fuzzing them hard matters. But standing up a serious fuzzing campaign is painful: build the target in Docker, set up Nyx snapshot fuzzing (which needs KVM), launch a dozen coordinated AFL++ instances with the right strategy mix, monitor them in tmux, and clean up the QEMU processes they leave behind.
This talk is about Smite, an open-source Lightning snapshot fuzzing framework by Matt Morehouse, and smitebot, the campaign-manager CLI I'm building for it as a Summer of Bitcoin 2026 contributor. smitebot collapses that multi-step workflow into single commands - doctor, build, start, stop, status, and more, while making the hard parts correct by default: parallel-fuzzer strategy distribution, liveness-verified startup, clean process teardown, and crash-safe campaign state.
You'll leave understanding:
- What coverage-guided fuzzing and snapshot fuzzing (AFL++ + Nyx) actually do
- Why fuzzing is one of the highest-impact ways to contribute to security-critical open source and how a student can start
- Real engineering lessons from building orchestration tooling: wrapping an existing toolchain instead of reinventing it, and getting process lifecycle and error reporting right
No prior fuzzing experience needed. Live demo included.
Session author's bio
Ashish Kumar Dash is a CSE undergraduate at IIT Bhilai and a Summer of Bitcoin 2026 mentee, mentored by Matt Morehouse & Nishant Bansal, building fuzzing tooling for Lightning Network nodes. His work automates AFL++ coverage-guided fuzzing against Lightning daemons, harness design, crash triage, and finding what breaks in security-critical network code. Beyond Bitcoin, he is an Open Mainframe Project mentee on the Zowe Client Java SDK (LFX Mentorship, mentored by Frank Giordano, Broadcom), contributes to skpro as a formal mentee, and serves as secretary of OpenLake, IIT Bhilai's open-source society.
Special accommodations
Demo needs a machine with KVM/nested virtualization, otherwise I'll use my own laptop + recorded fallback
Any other info we should know?
The talk is layered: the first half needs no fuzzing background and leaves everyone with a working mental model of how coverage-guided and snapshot fuzzing actually work and why they matter; the second half goes into the real engineering for those who want depth, including the design tradeoffs behind scoping graceful shutdown to the coverage/replay path and detecting stale process groups. I'll close with a live demo of a full campaign start/status/stop cycle (with a recorded fallback), a concrete on-ramp for anyone wanting to contribute through Summer of Bitcoin, and if there's interest, for those who want to go further- an optional hands-on workshop to run smitebot on their own machine. Audience: contributors curious about security and fuzzing, plus engineers interested in building orchestration tooling around complex toolchains.
| Level of Difficulty | Intermediate |
|---|---|
| Please confirm that there are included headshots of all speakers in their profiles | Yes |
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| In Person Attendance | In-person |