When you submit your smart contracts for audit, you are effectively requesting a complete evaluation of the code as well as a vulnerability check. An audit can be conducted in a variety of methods, including automated tools and testing, manual inspections by professional auditors, or both. All approaches are vital and need a thorough grasp of the code and potential attack vectors that can be used against a smart contract.
Automated tools & testing
The first and most important item to look for before doing an audit is well-specified smart contract documentation, usually provided through a README file. It should describe the project’s architecture and design choices. It should also include a business logic or whitepaper, a codebase, and other important documentation.
With all documentation in place, the audit can be started – usually with automated testing. There are several public tools accessible for developers to employ to undertake smart contract security assessments. Mythril is a popular tool for bytecode auditing of EVM chains. It detects vulnerabilities as well as numeric overflows. It also employs taint analysis and control flow verification. Slither is another useful tool. This Python-based tool enables users to do static analysis of smart contracts. It also expedites the review of automated audit results. Geth, Ganache, and Splinter are also among the various tools available. Each tool has its unique set of capabilities.
An automated test suite is also a wonderful technique to uncover easily identifiable flaws. It should be able to identify common code flaws and backdoors such as integer overflows, flash loans, and others. It can, however, generate a large number of false negatives. This is why it is critical to integrate manual and automated testing in a thoughtful and balanced manner.
Automated tools are helpful in reducing the time required for the audit process. But they can’t replace a thorough human examination.
Manual verification
With all the tests completed (or right alongside them), auditors can start with manual verification of the code. The group of specialists inspects the code line by line, looking for potential logic issues, loopholes in the code, or simple mistakes or small discrepancies that might affect the code and lead to malfunction or even hacking. This ensures that no code gets missed and reduces the number of false positives from the automated testing.
This part of the audit usually comes in numerous rounds as auditors send reports to the project team with their findings and wait for the fixes to check the code again. After the extensive exchange of findings and solutions, the final report is prepared when both auditors and the project team are happy with the results and the code is performing as intended without any problems.
There are a number of companies that offer smart contract auditing services. These companies vary in quality and price. Finding the right fit can be a lengthy process and will depend on your budget and code size.
Costs of a smart contract audit
Smart contract auditing expenses vary greatly based on various factors. The complexity of your smart contract, the number of individuals engaged, and the length of the audit are just a few examples. The expense for major organizations might approach a half-million dollars, while small ones will range between 10 to 20 thousand dollars.
After finishing the audit process, projects should start looking into continuous security monitoring and risk management https://www.apostro.xyz/product/smart-contract-audit to keep the code secure even with upgrades or small bug fixes that can affect the code logic if left unchecked.
