Sui Smart Contract – Audit Process

A smart Sui contract security audit helps identify potential vulnerabilities in your system. This allows you to fix these vulnerabilities before an attacker takes advantage of them and destroys everything you’ve done.

However, with this new technology, you might wonder what smart contract auditing is, why smart contract security auditing is important, and whether you need smart contract auditing.

Blockchain security is part of the famous trilemma:

• Safety
• Scalability
• Decentralization

These three critical aspects of a network or decentralized application must be balanced.

A decentralized crypto application must work reliably and consistently like any software project. Otherwise, customers will quickly lose trust in it.

The key method to prevent this is a code audit provided by an external source. We will look at the steps of how smart contract auditing works, what vulnerabilities it can find, who exactly works in this area, and finally, how skipping an audit can lead to catastrophic losses.

Smart Contract Audit

A smart contract audit is a comprehensive and systematic study and analysis of the code used by a smart contract to interact with cryptocurrency or blockchain technology. This process finds bugs, technical issues, and security holes in the code. With it, security audit experts for smart contracts can recommend solutions and make changes. An audit of smart contracts is usually required because most contracts involve valuable items and digital assets.

A smart audit of a contract does not provide a full guarantee that the contract will not contain errors or vulnerabilities. However, it guarantees the security of the smart contract after evaluation by a technical expert.

The Process and Importance of an Audit

A weak smart contract reflects more than just a failed programming attempt. This can tarnish a developer’s image and ruin projects that have taken months or years to launch. As a result, smart auditing contracts are now one of the development steps programmers undertake for every new project.

A smart contract security audit checks and comments on a project’s smart contract code. These contracts are usually written in the Solidity programming language and maintained through GitHub. Security audits are especially valuable for decentralized finance projects that expect millions of dollars worth of blockchain transactions or a huge number of investors to be processed.

This process offers the following benefits:

• Improved protection against hackers.
• Prevents costly smart contract errors.
• More secure decentralized financial products.
• Increase the credibility of the project and the entire industry.
• Higher level of trust in an industry with growing competition.

The Sui external audit team should understand the project well: its architecture, business logic, practical application, etc.

The client should also describe the objectives of the audit, how the tests should be performed, what use cases should be tested, and other key information. The audit team then examines the entire repository to understand how the dApp logic is implemented.

Smart contract auditing follows a fairly standard process among audit service providers. Although a slightly different approach may be used for each link, the standard procedure is as follows four main steps.

Checking Project Volumes

The smart contract specification and other related documents contain a detailed description of the project architecture, construction process, and design decisions. In addition, a project’s README file usually includes a description of the specifications.

Smart contract auditing is not only focused on the security of the blockchain. You are also looking at efficiency and improvement. For example, some contracts perform a complex series of transactions to fulfill their intended function. Because processing fees are relatively high on networks like Ethereum, efficient contracts can save a lot of transaction costs.

Unit Test

Here it is the developer’s responsibility to write test cases. During unit tests, the validator checks if the smart contract works as expected. At this stage, smart contract auditors use testing tools and an audit network to ensure that unit testing covers all relevant risks.

In addition, the tests provide smart contract auditors with access to information documents that provide additional information about the planned functionality of the project.

Manual Check

The most important part of the peer review process. The checker checks each line of code for errors. This step helps to find errors missed by automatic tools. It also detects false positives: snippets of code that automated audit software erroneously flags as vulnerabilities.

An audit can reveal vulnerabilities of varying severity:

• Critical level – allows an attacker to steal tokens, hack a dApp, and so on;
• Medium level — potential damage is limited;
• Low level – the risk of financial or structural damage.

Automatic check

After manual validation, the validator performs a detailed code review using validation tools. Finally, the auditor recommends auditing the smart contract based on identified vulnerabilities and code optimization.

Much of the audit work involves checking contracts for security vulnerabilities. While it’s easy to see some of the problems, many exploits include advanced techniques and strategies to siphon money off. For example, market manipulation with vulnerable smart contracts can be used to launch attacks on fast loans. To find these issues, the validator begins the process of crash testing and simulating malicious attacks on smart contracts.

Tools and Arsenal of Auditors

There are few software tools for testing smart contracts; almost all are for Solidity and EVM chains. They cannot find flaws in business logic or tokenomics or Sui token holders, but they save auditors a lot of time.

The most popular of them among developer communities:

• Mythril by ConsenSys is a powerful open-source tool that detects many critical errors.
• Slither is a fast and easy-to-use checker that highlights critical vulnerabilities and provides fixes.
• Oyente – Created in 2016, this tool has not been updated for a couple of years but still gets good reviews for accuracy.

Audit Report: The Final Stage of the Whole Process

Finally, the results are compiled into a multi-page report delivered to the client. It contains a list of detected errors and recommendations for their elimination and further improvement of project security.

It is standard practice in blockchain to make audit reports public: this is a good marketing tool for projects as it demonstrates both the security and transparency of the dApp.

Of course, if any critical vulnerabilities are discovered, the project will usually fix them and publish them.

Cyber ​​Attacks on the Sui Network and Smart Contracts

The responsibility for finding and fixing vulnerabilities lies with blockchain developers before they are used for real attacks.

Attackers use two main methods to attack: baiting and retaliation successfully. The first is based on social engineering tricks, such as persuading the victim to send cryptocurrency to the attacker’s wallet; The second and more complex strategy requires a deep understanding of the smart contracts of the Sui CLI client network and related elements such as cross-chain and side-chain wallets, as well as knowledge of several protocols.

Since huge amounts are committed or stored in smart contracts, they become attractive targets for malicious attacks by hackers. In addition, simple programming mistakes can lead to huge amounts of money being stolen.

Conclusion

Sui moves confidently in today’s market. The team announces many features for the Sui platform, like a new protection system with the simplest entry functions, instant settlement, a decrease in gas object transfer, and reliable smart contracts; the attention of various hackers and attackers for light tokens is increasing. Speaking of tokens, the total supply of the SUI token is 10 billion. It will be distributed among the founding team, the best Sui explorer, investors, and the interested community.

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