How To Prepare For A Smart Contract Audit

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If you’ve reached the point where you’re ready to get a smart contract audit, then it is important to prepare correctly so that you can receive the most value from the audit. At a high level, the most important things you can do to prepare for a smart contract audit are:

• Clearly document your system's intended functionality
• Document your main concerns and communicate them to the auditors
• Clean up your code
• Freeze your code
• Allocate time for fixes

Clear documentation

A huge part of smart contract auditing is gaining a clear and deep understanding of the intended purpose of the system or platform. For example, if you’re building a Play-to-Earn GameFi platform, include detailed descriptions for the overall system and each supporting smart contract.

Your documentation should include a clear specification of your system's intended functionality, design decisions, considerations, and trade-offs. For each individual contract, you should clearly define the most important properties and the behaviours that should be maintained.

Time spent by you beforehand in creating clear documentation will result in a faster, higher-quality audit.

Share your concerns

Even if you’re not a cybersecurity expert, you will likely still have a few areas of concern for your system. Are you worried about a potential exploit or does one part of your design worry you? If so, let the audit team know upfront.

Clean up your code

It is very important to clean up your code before getting audited. This will save time and result in a faster, higher-quality smart contract audit. Run a linter on your code and fix any errors that come from it, address all compiler warnings, remove any code that isn’t needed, and address/remove any todo or fix indicators. Doing all of these things will result in a better audit experience.

Freeze your code

Freezing your code before auditing is very important. This is because any changes you make after the audit begins will not be included in the scope of the audit. You should halt development and relay a specific GitHub comment hash to begin the commencement of the audit. It’s important to remember that it is better to delay an audit until you are ready, rather than make changes to the code after the audit.

Allocate time for fixes

When building your project plan and launch date it is important to include time for potential fixes that will need to be made after the smart contract audit is complete. Until the audit has been carried out, you will not know what vulnerabilities or issues may arise. Some fixes may be small, but other vulnerabilities may require architectural changes to the codebase which will require time for restructuring and refactoring. This is why it’s key to bake in time after the initial audit to make sure you have time to properly address the required fixes and have them reviewed before you go live.

Conclusion

Smart contract audits are a key step to releasing a new blockchain platform and it is essential that you do the preparation work to ensure you get the most value from it. If you follow the steps outlined above, you will be in a position to have a great audit experience.

If you’re looking to get a smart contract audit or would like to learn more about the services that HYDN Security offer — get in touch with us today.

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