With the rapid development of Rust Smart Contracts technology and its vast implementation into the internet, many cybercriminals are looking for ways of attacking contracts for profit. Rust Smart Contracts owners should be very concerned about such threats and take appropriate actions to prevent any danger to their projects. One of the common ways to secure your smart contract and the money flowing through it is by conducting a Rust Smart Contract Security Audit.
Never heard of it, or don’t know how it works? Not a problem. This article will explain everything you need to know about a Rust audit process and how it can significantly raise your Smart Contract security.
Why Rust Projects Owners should be worried about Blockchain Security?
Rust is one of the most functional programming languages for writing smart contracts on the blockchain platform. For example, Rust language is utilized to write Casper, Polkadot, and Solana blockchain smart contracts. Hundreds of millions of dollars flow through these contracts daily, making them a sweet target for cybercriminals.
Even though blockchain security is pretty good on its own, hackers still manage to find critical vulnerabilities to exploit. As a result, since 2020, ten different Rust projects have been hacked for more than $390 000 000. That is why cybersecurity should be one of the main concerns of the Rust smart contract owner.
What is Rust Smart Contract Security Audit?
Project owners often hire a team of auditors to find potential vulnerabilities and logic bugs in their Rust smart contracts and get rid of them. The group consists solely of Blockchain professionals, and each member is a specialist in a particular niche (virtual machines, for example). The Rust Audit itself is a carefully performed code review. To perform a smart contract audit, the team breaks down the process into a couple of simple steps:
- Initial analysis stage. You will need to give the auditors all the information about the smart contracts the expertise requires. The team learns the structure of the code and distributes itself to specific code areas;
- Main code review. That is the main part of the process when the team starts to carefully expertise a subject. Depending on the smart contract scale, the length of this step varies. But generally, it takes quite some time to inspect the Rust code for vulnerabilities;
- Forming a report. Finally, based on the Rust code analysis, the team creates a closing document: a report. The report is used by the customer to implement practices that will secure the code and get rid of specific vulnerabilities. Some auditing companies offer services of remediating vulnerabilities on their own, but it will cost additional funds.
Who Should Consider a Smart Contract Code Audit?
Anyone who wants to develop a serious platform using a smart contract should know that it is essential to get your code audited. For example, you are a Solana blockchain DeFi investor who wants to build his project. If you do that without conducting a smart contract audit, you risk losing some (or even all) of your finances due to the exploited vulnerability. So to protect your own and your client’s money, one of the things you have to do is run an audit.
What should you Consider before Auditing a Rust Smart Contract?
Before your project is audited, you must complete a couple of easy planning steps. These steps will help each member of the auditing team to get the most efficiency out of the process.
- Set a scope of the audit. Determined scope means that you know the weak spots of your smart contract, which should be inspected as closely as possible. Thus, you are choosing and announcing a goal of the project, making it easier for the audit team to reach it;
- Time factor. To dig into your code and find each vulnerability, the team will need to spend lots of time on it. The time factor is stretchy, as your goals and project scales can vary, but it takes at least a couple of days;
- Tests. From time to time, an auditing team will request you to make your smart contract function by engaging users in transactions to create a simulation of its everyday work. It is required for some additional examination;
- Work on your mistakes. Once you are handed a security report, you should be ready to start working with it. So decide whether you want to hire an additional team for remediating flaws/ask the auditing team for that, or maybe you already have your employees to work on security;
Conclusion
Smart contracts security audits are simple yet effective tools to protect your DeFi projects written in Rust programming language. Remember that once your platform starts to run major transactions, criminals will quickly see it as their target. So you should give no window of opportunity to hackers and take action quickly. That way, you can protect funds of your own and money of other accounts using your platform.
Frequently Asked Questions
The initial cost of a smart contract code audit starts from at least a couple of thousand dollars. Additionally, depending on the scale of your project and goals, the price can grow significantly.
Smart contract owners should consider auditing as soon as their platforms start to run major transactions.
Smart contract code audits are essential for every entrepreneur that takes their business seriously. And so, if you have a serious platform that you don’t want to get money stolen from, you should run an audit. Otherwise, you are under threat.