Smart contract auditing equips users to make educated decisions, mitigate risks, and protect their assets by identifying the potential dangers of a contract. It is also important because it enables users to act rationally.
How to Read Smart Contract Control?
Smart contract auditing ensures that a dApp’s smart contracts are reliable, accurate, and secure. Potential investors should pay attention to the review, summary, and breakdown of findings that reveal potential ways the contract could be hacked.
Smart contracts are self-executing contracts where contract terms are written directly into code. They go through a scrutiny called “smart contract auditing” to make sure they are reliable, accurate and secure. In the audit, qualified engineers (also known as auditors) will closely examine the code of the smart contract to find any bugs, issues or potential hazards.
This process involves multiple steps and the auditors will eventually produce a report for anyone interested in the project to read and assess the potential hazards of the contract.
Understanding how to read and interpret a smart contract audit report is crucial to assessing the security and reliability of blockchain-based systems. To use the report effectively and make informed decisions, you must first understand how these reports are structured and where to look.
Audit reports are intended for developers and project owners, so they can be very detailed and technical. The good news is that you don’t need to understand the code to gain valuable insights from these reports. Depending on the audit firm, reports may include code diagnostics, flowcharts, various graphs, findings, analysis, etc. It will have different sections.
As an investor, you can safely ignore the rest if you are interested in the review, findings and summary, which is usually the first part of the audit, but are not interested in learning more about the Agreement and how it works.
Review
The review section of the smart contract control will give you the address about the contract, what compiler version it is using, the network, etc. It will give general information such as This is an important step to verify that the contract address is the same as the contract address. It’s also important to check if the audit report you’re reading comes from the audit firm’s official website or GitHub repository. Cases of projects faking their own controls to defraud investors have been reported.
Findings
Auditors categorize and describe errors or problems they discover during the audit in the breakdown of findings. Each finding is detailed, along with how serious it is and the potential impact on the contract and its users.
Findings are often categorized as “Critical”, “Moderate” and “Minor”. Critical findings are the ones you should be aware of. These findings can have detrimental effects on the project if not addressed by the project team. It usually means that the contract can be abused by the project team or external actors.
Summary
The Summary section provides a brief description of the smart contract control. It summarizes key results, analyzes and recommendations in a clear and simple way. You should always check the summary of the audit to get an overall picture of the state of the smart contract and what the key findings the auditors are discovering.
