How to Prepare for Smart Contract Audit in 5 Steps

Maintaining secure transactions and protecting user assets is crucial in the ever-evolving realm of decentralized applications (dApps) and Web3 apps. It's imperative to understand how to prepare for a smart contract audit to increase your project's security and credibility. Moreover, the audit process could be expensive, and this guide will help you decrease the cost and length of the audit process.

Suitable preparation for an audit encompasses several steps and considerations. Here's a comprehensive guide.

Planning out the timeline for your project can be complex, and having a well-organized schedule is crucial to prevent any problems. If you anticipate having an audit, it's wise to discuss it beforehand. When the audit occurs, the codebase must be frozen and nearly production-ready at a specific commit. This guarantees the utmost level of safety, as any necessary corrections can only be made after the audit.

In general, there are functional and technical documentation.

The functional requirements documentation should be easily understandable, specific, and precise. It should outline user operations, system inputs and outputs, system constraints or limitations, and performance or reliability requirements. This gives auditors a better understanding of the application's intended functionality and expected behavior.

The technical documentation offers a holistic understanding of the application's software. It should encompass technologies used, the development environment, any third-party dependencies or software, system architecture, and interactions (both internal and external). For projects involving multiple smart contracts, detailing inter-contract dependencies is crucial to help auditors analyze their effect on other smart contracts.

The last part is previous audits. If you have been audited before, it is essential to have information about the earlier vulnerabilities for a new audit.

Your project should have a development environment (Truffle, Hardhat, Foundry, etc.) that isn't dependent on private dependencies and is compatible with various operating systems.

If you need a development environment, we could assist in setting it up based on technical configurations and suitable software packages. This significantly impacts the code quality metric.

The code should be accessible and well-organized, and all TODO and FIX comments should be resolved, compilable, and in line with an official language style guide. Offering access to the code via a repository, such as GitHub, Bitbucket, or GitLab, streamlines the audit process. For code clearness, you could use NatSpec approach.

Prepare your thoughts on audit scope to guide auditors on the contracts requiring their attention. This should include the repository link, branch name, commit, and the path to the contracts awaiting an audit.

Specifying contract paths is not necessary if the entire repository is up for audit. Sometimes, a repository may contain vital code not included in the contracts folder, such as when a project uses inline assembly or delegates calls.

Of course, if the project cannot fully define the scope, it needs to highlight the most crucial contracts for the system, and we will help finalize the scope based on the best practice and the project specific.

A robust set of unit tests gives auditors a better understanding of the smart contracts from a developer's perspective. The tests should cover a wide array of scenarios, including both positive and negative cases. Also, cases involving multiple users and third-party tools should be accessible and executable. The 100% coverage is preferable.

Read More: Manual vs Formal Smart Contract Audits

A smart contract audit can significantly secure your project and help prevent potential vulnerabilities. It's more than just passing the audit – it's about building a secure, reliable, and trusted application. By creating comprehensive documentation, setting up a fitting development environment, and preparing your codebase for audit, you make your project more desirable to auditors. The better your preparation, the smoother, faster, and cheaper the audit process, ultimately boosting the chances of successful completion. In Mundus Security, we are always happy to discuss with companies any questions related to their security and audit preparation. Let's talk: https://calendly.com/alex-mundus/public-mundus-security