What is a Smart Contract Audit?

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Are you launching a token, NFT, or other crypto project and want to know what a smart contract audit does? Read on to find out why smart contract audits are so important.

In short, a smart contract security audit provides a detailed analysis of a project’s smart contracts to ensure that any vulnerabilities or bugs are found before the smart contract is deployed.

Intro

Blockchain technology has revolutionized the world in many ways, with industries across a range of sectors taking advantage of the benefits it creates. Hacks and exploits have also plagued the space though with two of the biggest hacks coming in the past two years with hackers stealing $614m from the Ronin Network in 2022 and $611m from the Poly Network in 2021.

Blockchain products use smart contracts for interacting with the blockchain and these smart contracts have security vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hackers if they are not coded correctly.

What is a smart contract audit?

A smart contract audit examines and comments on a project's smart contract code, usually written in Solidity. Audits usually follow the same steps, with the HYDN Security Smart Contract Audits following a simple six-step process:

• Contact — You request an audit with details about your project and share your source code
• Quote — We analyse your code, provide a quote, and arrange a kick-off meeting
• Audit — We manually audit your code to find issues, vulnerabilities, and exploits
• Report — We send your team a detailed, private report with issues and recommended fixes
• Fixes — Your team fixes the issues and informs us once it is done
• Certify — We check your code once more and send you an updated audit report and certificate

Why are smart contract security audits important?

The most important reason why smart contract security audits are important is in the name — Security.

Security is paramount in every industry and with the increasing volume of hacks within the blockchain space, ensuring that a smart contract is secure is essential. Some of the most forms of attacks include:

• Reentrancy attacks
• Reordering attacks
• Short address attacks
• Replay attacks
• Over/underflows

Alongside this, smart contract audits are important to address a number of issues, including

• Improved code optimization
• Improved performance of smart contracts
• Improved gas efficiency
• Enhanced security of wallets
• Platform security flaws
• Code maturity

For many crypto users and investors, smart contract audits are essential when choosing a new project to invest in. Users now expect that a project will have been audited and if it hasn’t been, then it can often raise red flags for investors.

What is a smart contract security audit report?

During a smart contract audit, you will receive two reports. The first report you receive will be after the team has done a deep automatic and manual analysis of the code and will be a private report including any issues or vulnerabilities that have been found along with recommendations on how to fix them. The report will categorise issues by severity (critical, major, minor etc) and will also provide information on redundant code, coding errors, and code maturity.

After your project team has fixed these issues, you will resubmit the code and the HYDN Security team will analyse it once again.

If all issues are found to have been fixed then you will receive a final report and certification of the audit.

How do I get a smart contract security audit?

HYDN Security is an industry-leading team of blockchain security and tokenomics experts. HYDN Security provides comprehensive smart contract security audits and tokenomics consultancy from a team of experienced blockchain and cybersecurity professionals.

HYDN Security was founded by Warren Mercer. Warren is a world-renowned cybersecurity and blockchain expert, having previously held senior roles at NYSE, Cisco, and Alert Logic. Warren has been a guest speaker at cybersecurity conferences all over the globe, including giving talks on Bitcoin at Microsoft DCC, NorthSec, Kaspersky SAS, VB, and many more.

Having been involved in cryptocurrency for over 10 years, Warren is dedicated to making the blockchain ecosystem as secure as it can be for everyone. Warren serves as the CEO for HYDN Security and heads up the delivery team to ensure that work is carried out to the highest standard.

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