Protecting Your Investments - Xamer Smart Contract Audits and Risk Mitigations

Xamer provides comprehensive smart contract auditing services that employ mathematical approaches such as formal verification to ensure logical soundness. Smart contracts are relatively new, and their programming language can be difficult to understand for non-programmers. Therefore, there is a growing need for third-party security assurance through smart contract audits.

The Security Auditing Process

Security should be integrated into the development process from the beginning to ensure ample time for a comprehensive audit and for addressing any issues before project launch. The auditing process is collaborative and employs various inspection techniques, including vulnerability inspection, formal verification, and manual review. After compiling a vulnerability summary, auditors provide a report to the client with recommendations for addressing any identified issues.

• Critical Risks: Significantly impact the platform’s safe operation and must be addressed before launch.
• Major Risks: Can involve certain centralization issues and logical errors and can lead to fund loss and loss of project control.
• Medium Risks: May not directly jeopardize user funds but can affect the overall functionality of a platform.
• Minor Risks: Do not compromise the project’s overall integrity but may be less efficient compared to other solutions.
• Informational Risks: Pertains to recommendations for improving course style or adhering to industry best practices and do not impact the overall functionality of the code.

The Most Common Vulnerabilities Found During Smart Contract Audits

• Centralization Risk: Possesses risk to both project owners and users, granting executive privilege to a single address which later has its private key compromised and can lead to loss of project control and user funds.
• Mission Event Emission: Certain smart contract functions should emit events after being caught as these emissions affect sensitive variables or initiate important processes.
• Unlock Compiler Version: Smart contracts should specify and log the version of compiler they utilize. Unlocking the compiler version in the contract source code allows users to compile it or above a specific version, resulting in different byte codes generation due to varying compiler version number.
• Lack of Proper Input Validation: Validating inputs, such as ensuring a variable in a function is greater than 0, limits the executable functionality to known possibilities. Restricting users’ ability to create unknown and potentially malicious events is essential.
• Reliance on Third-Party Dependencies: Minimizing reliance on third-party dependencies is crucial. Developers can only control the security of their code, not that of external contracts with which they are in contact.