Private Smart Contract Audits

The first step in our smart contract audit process is preparation. During this phase, we work closely with your team to understand the functionality and objectives of your smart contract. We review any documentation you provide, including the contract’s specifications, design patterns, and use cases. This helps us gain a thorough understanding of your contract’s intended behavior, which is crucial for the subsequent stages of the audit.

To ensure you gain the most from your audit, you should consider the following steps in preparation for the audit:

• Clearly establish the functional requirements for your project.
• Prepare a detailed technical description of your project.
• Set up a development environment for the project.
• Develop comprehensive unit tests.
• Ensure that the code complies with best practices and security standards.

Once we have a solid understanding of your smart contract, we move on to automated testing. We use state-of-the-art tools and software to scan your contract’s code for common vulnerabilities and inefficiencies. This includes checking for reentrancy attacks, timestamp dependencies, transaction-ordering dependencies, and more. Automated testing allows us to quickly identify and address common issues, but it’s just the first layer of our audit process.

Some of the tools our team members have experience with include Mythril, MythX, Slither, Oyente, Solhint, Securify, HoneyBadger, Manticore, VeriSmart, and others.

At Cryptosec, we’ve developed an advanced in-house AI tool specifically designed for smart contract audits. This tool performs an automated assessment of your smart contract, identifying potential vulnerabilities and inefficiencies that might be missed by standard automated testing. By incorporating AI into our audit process, we can provide a more thorough and accurate evaluation of your smart contract.

While automated testing is an essential part of our process, it’s not sufficient on its own. That’s why we follow it up with a thorough manual review of your contract’s code. Our experienced auditors meticulously examine your contract line by line, looking for complex vulnerabilities that automated tools might miss. It’s important to note that we always use multiple auditors to check any codebase. This includes checking for logic errors, contract interactions, and potential optimizations. The manual review also allows us to verify that your contract behaves as intended and aligns with its documentation.

Fuzzing is a sophisticated testing technique where we input a large amount of random data (“fuzz”) into your smart contract to see how it reacts. This helps us identify any unexpected or problematic behavior that might not be apparent under normal conditions. Fuzzing is particularly effective at uncovering edge cases that could potentially be exploited by malicious actors.

Formal Verification is a process that mathematically proves or disproves the correctness of a smart contract with respect to a certain formal specification or property. It uses logical and mathematical methods to analyze a system and ensure it behaves as expected. The effort would involve creating a formal model of the smart contract’s behavior and then using automated tools to verify that the contract’s code matches this model. Any discrepancies could indicate potential vulnerabilities or bugs in the contract.

Formal Verification can provide a high degree of assurance that a smart contract behaves as intended and is free of certain classes of vulnerabilities. However, it’s important to note that Formal Verification is a complex and time-consuming process that requires a high level of expertise. It’s typically used for contracts where the potential risks or value at stake justify the additional effort and cost.

This crucial stage of the audit process truly showcases the merits of our unique methodology. Until this point, our auditors have been conducting their examinations independently, allowing for unbiased scrutiny and in-depth exploration of the code from their respective perspectives. Now, these auditors come together for the first time, bringing their individual insights and discoveries into a joint discussion under the guidance of the lead auditor. We examine, converse about, and even argue over the identified issues in an open dialogue, fostering a more well-rounded understanding of your project’s potential vulnerabilities.

After we’ve completed the automated testing, manual review, fuzzing, and analysis, we compile our findings into a detailed audit report. This report includes a summary of our findings, a description of any vulnerabilities or inefficiencies we identified, and recommendations for improving the security and efficiency of your smart contract. We prioritize the issues based on their severity to help you address the most critical ones first.

Once you’ve had a chance to review our report and make the recommended changes, we conduct a final review of your smart contract to ensure all issues have been addressed. If necessary, we’ll repeat any of the previous steps to ensure your contract is as secure and efficient as possible.

Our commitment to your smart contract’s security doesn’t end with the delivery of the audit report. We provide post-audit support to help you implement our recommendations and answer any questions you might have. Our goal is to ensure you’re fully confident in the security and efficiency of your smart contract.