How to Prepare for a Smart Contract Audit 

Read Time: 5 minutes

Getting audited nowadays is equivalent to getting licensed. It makes your protocol more trusted and secure and attracts more users. With security being one of the prime concerns of web3 user-space audit has now become a very crucial part. This is evident by analysing how even the big fishes like polygon have started getting external audits. 

This blog will help you with the crucial steps and things you will need to take care of in order to send your code to audits. Here you will learn how to make sure you benefit from the auditing by following some practices.

These practices can be sequentially summed up as follows:-

1. Documentation

 1.1 Functional Documentation

 1.2 Technical Documentation

2. Development Environment

3. Best Coding Practices

4. Testing

 4.1 Manual Testing

 4.2 Automatic Testing

5. Scope of Auditing

6. Code Freezing

Let’s Explore each of them in detail.

1. Documentation

Documentation is a crucial part of beginning the process. This part helps us understand how you plan to carry things out and what we are trying to secure exactly.

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This section can be divided into two parts:-

1.1 Functional Documentation:- 

This documentation tells us about the basic vision of your protocol; this documentation carries answers to questions like:-

1. What mission are you on?
2. What does your protocol intend to do?
3. What sector are you working with?
4. What’s The final goal?
5. What are your limitations?

These things set us both on the same page about the project’s core values.

1.2 Technical Documentation:- 

This is the blueprint of how your protocol works; this part helps us understand the architecture of your protocol. The better this is quick is the action on your audits. Some things good technical documentation includes are:-

1. Technologies used
2. Description of Every Smart Contract
3. Development environment description
4. External Interactions
5. Internal Interactions
6. A good overview of cross-contract dependencies.

2. Development Environment

Development Environment is like a factory in which the product is made; the factory needs to be well maintained for the mechanics to fix some broken machines. That’s the importance of a well-maintained development environment for the success of the project development team needs to build a good development environment that helps with better and quick auditing. 

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Some of the vital points to take care of are:-

1. The dependencies should be public or given access to the audit team.
2. It can run on various operating systems.
3. Clean code practices should be followed.
4. Contain instructions regarding the initial setup of the project.

3. Best Code Practices

Good code quality benefits both the project’s in-house developers and us; it eases the process of making changes, helps developers understand the code base better, and helps pace up the work. A few of the code practices you can follow are:-

1. Keep your code simple
2. Comments are helpful
3. Try DRY(Do Not Repeat Yourself)
4. Have a good Naming Convention
5. Address the warning by compilers if any

4. Testing

Remember when the teacher used to give surprise tests in class? Those tests were meant to prepare you for unexpected questions so that you can adapt and do well in the final examinations. This phase works the same way for our Smart Contracts. This way, we check the robustness of our smart contracts and how it behaves in different cases. Is it up to the mark, or do we need some changes? This is the part from where the security perspective of Smart Contracts starts. We try to hack the code from here by creating tricky test cases.

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Testing can be classified in 2 broad ways:-

4.1 Manual:- 

This is when you scratch your head to create new tricky test cases to hack your Smart Contracts. In this step, we analyse different case scenarios and figure out how we can break the code. Majorly we use Truffle or Hardhat for that purpose.

4.2 Automatic:- 

This part deals with the automatic generation of test cases that work with the basic ones. There are different softwares out which can help you with this. Even the newly launched chatGPT can come under this umbrella. It can help you find basic flaws in your contracts.

5. Scope of auditing:- 

Suppose you want your house to be secured. Would you put a camera in your refrigerator? No right? Similarly, you need to find out which part of your protocol you want to get audited. Our team can help you with the best selection, as experts know the kind of hacks that can happen and what needs to be secured to prevent that. For example, you may secure your whole house, but sometimes people get robbed from below the floor. Our experienced experts will help secure every aspect of your web3 project.

6. Code Freezing:- 

Imagine a worker busy constructing the Eiffel Tower, but the designer made a change midway through. This may result in hours and hours of work going to waste. So it is advised to get your design and freeze the code after submitting it for audit so that they can give you better and quick results.

Conclusion

With these practices in mind, you are 100% ready to go for an Audit, And you MUST go for an audit. That’s how we will make web3 a safe and secure ecosystem. If we want to grow as a community, we need to provide our users with the best security, and who better to do that than QuillAudits, do visit our website and get your Web3 project secured!

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• Source: https://blog.quillhash.com/2023/02/13/how-to-prepare-for-a-smart-contract-audit/