Let's pierce through the secrets of how professionals audit smart contracts in the blockchain application!

We have now dived into the era of digitized smart contract deals with blockchain inception. Smart contracts are built on the blockchain framework, by which they adopt the features of the technology such as immutability, P2P transactions, tamper-proof, ergonomic reconciliation, and much more. Smart contract auditing is the process of analyzing the code base and rectifying the errors in code, functionality bugs, design issues, security issues, and vulnerabilities. It's advised to deploy smart contracts only after the smart contract audit company does professional auditing.

In this blog post, let's explore how professionals do smart contract auditing!

A step-by-step process of professional smart contract audit

Specification documentation

Smart contract audit must be done after the code-freeze(i.e., the development code has reached its final draft stage without any potential flaws). Once the code is committed by the development team, both the auditing and development team must agree with the specifications. Teams should rely on the fact that the team will not audit changes made after the commit code. Even though whitepaper specifies the project's detailed view and milestones, it can not replace a well-written specification document. The specification document is the kick-start of the professional audit process that tells the functionalities of code and intent. This document act as the backbone of the smart contract auditing process. 

Testing

Testing the smart contracts from unit tests to integration testing decreases potential bugs' chances, making the audit process much easier. The unit test cases and their reports ensure that developers have ensured that the pieces of code are developed based on the intended performance. They are utilized as the informal audit documentation by the auditors. Usually, the auditors run the test suite and determine the line coverage. If the code passes a higher number of tests, then the line coverage is higher and vice versa. In general, the quality assurance team prefers 100% line coverage, but 85-90% is acceptable as the reasonable quality. If the line coverage is below 75%, then the development team must rework the code. 

Automated testing and fixing

Smart contracts demand safer and flawless codes as they are deployed in the blockchain network. By analyzing the Solidity smart contracts, common vulnerabilities have been identified, and to rectify them, symbolic execution tools have been developed. Symbolic tools analyze the input and the respective piece of code to be executed. These tools reduce human efforts in common bugs and increase their potential novel vulnerabilities and false positives. As these symbolic tools are early stages of implementation, there exist false positives that claim incorrect issues without knowing the context and intent of code pice. Hence, the auditors go for manual verification!

Manual analysis

Automated tools are not aware of the intent of code; they do report false positives. Hence, manual inspection is required before getting ready with audit reports. Experienced smart contract auditors get insights from specifications and analyze the code from scratch and detect potential bugs. 

Audit report

Once the audit team surpasses the testing, automated test analysis, and manual inspection, the audit team must draft the audit report's final copy. The audit and development team must have a compelling discussion on the report generated and fix the bugs. If possible, the development team must seek help from auditors for the follow-up after rectifying code patches. 

Final verdict!

Smart contract audit may seem expensive to the entities, but the potential loss with even a small loophole would cause huge asset loss in transactions. If you're looking for a professional smart contract audit team, then do knock on our doors! Our team is on its wings to serve you!