Smart Contract Audit: What To Look For While Auditing Smart Contracts
Secure Your Smart Contract
With the booming crypto economy and TVL figures creating bigger and newer records every month challenging security, the imperativeness of smart contract auditors has become even more significant. There are so many applications of blockchain technology, helping the projects utilize the technology and add some new value to the existing ecosystem. As a result, it has become easier to handle user funds.
We must also recognize the security breaches that have become a significant part of our day-to-day lives. Any lax in security will give disastrous results, as proven by the recent exploits in October. Popularly called ‘Hacktober,’ October 2022 has been called the “worst month” for crypto investors.
It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that the crypto space has become a den of thieves and exploiters. Thus, it makes the security of funds paramount to enhance the project’s integrity. And November would be no different, with so many attacks already happening, giving it a rocky start! In this situation, relying upon a credible blockchain security company can only prove to be a relief.
Smart contract audits come into play when determining the functionality and security of smart contracts. You can perform it by in-house auditors or third-party organizations, among which the latter is mainly preferred. This ensures objective analysis, adding value to the project’s credibility.
Preparing For The Smart Contract Audit
Once the team is done building the blockchain app, they will also make sure that everything goes as intended and no surprises are waiting for them around the corner.
So, they roll out the smart contract to the blockchain security company, which assigns it to their experienced auditors. Irrespective of your years of experience as an auditor, it is a must to stick to a checklist for carrying out the smart contract auditing process.
The Smart Contract Audit Checklist
The complete auditing process can be broken down into more minor, distinct phases at the helm of one or more erudite auditors.
The first pilot phase is the preparation stage. Here, the auditors try to garner as much information as possible from the clients as per their required format. Undoubtedly, this phase forms the foundation for the entire smart contract audit process.
These are the checklists that smart contract auditors follow.
Step 1: Understand the Project
In this step, the auditors will ask for all the information related to the project from the developers. This includes detailed documentation of the project, its components, and the technologies used.
Step 2: Establish a Development Environment
With the information given by the project’s founders, the audit team will now establish a development environment wherein they will let them know about all the necessary software packages that would suit the technical configurations of the given project.
Step 3: Access to the Code
With the established development environment, the auditors now view the actual code. If the auditors get a clean codebase with proper formatting according to the set conventions, it makes the work way easier.
Step 4: Verify the scope of the audit
Every audit has a different scope- while some clients might want you to audit only some selected portions of the project, others may ask you to cover the entire project.
Following is the information that you need to include in this scope.
- Repository link
- Branch name
- Commit
- Path to contracts that have to be audited
However, there may be times when there would be some critical code that is beyond the scope of the audit. In such cases, you need to mention: “this audit covers only contracts from the scope section. Therefore, the repository contains contracts out of scope and cannot be verified.”
Step 5: Check the functional and technical requirements
These aspects are there in the documentation that the client provides in the first step itself. However, it is mandatory to re-check whether you have both of these requirements with you.
Most of the projects that use smart contracts have cross-contact dependencies.
Wrap-up:
Smart contract auditing is the best way to eliminate the vulnerabilities in the early stage itself, as an effective solution against all the security branches happening these days.
Relying on the smart contract auditors will give you an insight into the technicalities and nuances that they keep in mind while auditing a project. So, what are you waiting for?
