When you send your smart contracts for an audit, you essentially ask for a thorough inspection of the code and vulnerability scan. There are various ways to go about an audit – it can be done with automated tools and testing, manual checks from professional auditors, or both. All methods are important and require that you have a good understanding of the different techniques involved in testing a smart contract.
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Test line coverage
The first and foremost thing to check before the audit is a well-documented smart contract specification, such as a README file. It should explain the project architecture and design decisions. In addition, it should contain a business logic or whitepaper, a codebase, and other relevant documentation.
Tests, such as unit tests and integration tests, verify that the project works as it should. And an automated test suite is a great way to find easily detectable vulnerabilities. It should be able to detect common loopholes and backdoors in the code, such as integer overflows, flash loans, and more. However, it can also produce quite a lot of false negatives. This is why it is important to combine manual and automated testing in a smart and balanced fashion.
Automated tools are helpful in reducing the time required for the audit process. But they can’t replace a thorough human examination.
Tiered code inspection
There are a number of companies that offer smart contract auditing services. These companies vary in quality and price. The best way to determine which auditing company will be right for your project is to find out what they do.
Many audit firms use automated tools to detect potential flaws alongside manual checks to enhance the audit. A group of experts inspects code one line at a time. This ensures that no code gets missed. In addition to detecting security issues, the team can detect design deficiencies and hidden loopholes in the business logic that might affect the protocol.
Automated tools for developers
There are a number of tools available for the public that developers can use to perform smart contract security analysis. These include static and dynamic analysis. The dynamic analysis looks for possible vulnerabilities and mistakes in code. Moreover, it looks for bad or undesirable patterns in code.
The dynamic analysis tools also look for patterns that may cause errors during the execution of smart contracts. Some of them analyze the generated output, and others focus on the source code.
One of the most popular tools for bytecode auditing of EVM chains is Mythril. It identifies vulnerabilities and numeric overflows. In addition, it uses taint analysis and control flow checking. Another tool is Slither. This tool is Python-based, and it allows users to perform static analysis of smart contracts. It also speeds up the analysis of automatic audit results.
There are a number of other tools, including Geth, Ganache, and Splinter. Each tool has its own features.
Costs of a smart contract audit
Smart contract auditing costs are very variable, depending on several factors. Some of these include the complexity of your smart contract, the number of people involved, and the duration of the audit. For large enterprises, the cost can reach up to a half-million dollars.
Smart contract auditing companies examine the intricacies of your contract and make recommendations for improved security. They draft reports detailing code flaws and give you suggestions to address them. After iterations of feedback and several manual checks, the final report will be released to the public and the audit will be finished.
After the audit is complete, it is time to look into continuous security monitoring and risk management.
