Smart contract audit
Prevent costly exploits, protect user funds, and launch with confidence. A Hackerbane smart contract audit combines senior-led manual review, structured testing, and real-world exploit analysis so your protocol ships without the bugs that drain treasuries.
What is a smart contract audit?
A smart contract audit is a structured security review of a smart contract's source code. Auditors examine logic, dependencies, permissions, and state transitions to find vulnerabilities and high-impact edge cases before they reach production.
The biggest losses come from broken authorization and control paths, not from exotic bugs. That is why we focus on who can do what, under which constraints, and how funds move, rather than pattern matching alone.
Three layers of review
- Automated scanning: static analysis and custom detectors surface known vulnerability patterns across the whole codebase.
- Manual code review: two senior engineers read the contracts in parallel to find logic flaws, access-control gaps, and economic exploits that tools miss.
- Dynamic testing: fuzzing, invariant checks, and integration tests stress-test behavior under inputs your unit tests never reach.
What we review
- Accounting and fund flows: balances, minting and burning, fee math, rounding, and every path that moves value.
- Access control and roles: admin functions, ownership transfer, multisig and timelock assumptions, pause and emergency controls.
- Upgradeability: proxy patterns, storage layout, initialization, and how a new version is installed without corrupting state.
- Oracles and pricing: feed dependencies, staleness, manipulation windows, liquidation and arbitrage paths.
- External integrations and cross-chain messages: what each side treats as final, replay protection, and trusted callers.
- Automation and AI agents: any bot, keeper, or model-driven workflow that can propose, sign, or execute a transaction.
Why audits are critical
Smart contracts are immutable once deployed and hold value from the first block. A single unchecked permission or flawed upgrade path can drain a protocol in one transaction, and there is no rollback.
Regulatory and listing requirements are rising. EU frameworks such as MiCA raise expectations around security and risk controls, and exchanges, custodians, and integration partners routinely require a third-party audit before a listing or integration.
An audit also lowers your long-term cost. Findings arrive with root causes and fixes your engineers can ship against, and the detectors and invariant tests we leave behind catch the next class of bug before it reaches mainnet.
What you get from a Hackerbane smart contract audit
- Prioritized findings your engineers can ship against: clear severity, impact, and fix guidance structured for fast triage.
- Verifiable proofs of concept for High and Critical issues, so your team and your stakeholders understand the real-world risk.
- A report you can share with partners and exchanges: scope, system overview, threat model, findings, definitions, and fuzz and invariant results where applied.
- Remediation verification: submit in-scope fixes within the agreed window and we re-check them, confirm they introduce no new risk, and update the final report.
- Direct access to the auditors throughout the engagement, with findings delivered as they are confirmed rather than only at the end.
Most common smart contract vulnerabilities
- Reentrancy and read-only reentrancy: a function is re-entered before the previous execution completes, or a view function is used to manipulate pricing in an external protocol.
- Access control and authorization failures: unprotected admin functions, missing role checks, or flawed ownership transfer logic.
- Oracle manipulation: price feed dependencies exploited to create artificial arbitrage, drain lending pools, or force liquidations.
- Upgradeability and storage errors: uninitialized proxies, storage collisions, and upgrade paths that a single key can abuse.
- Accounting and precision errors: rounding in the attacker's favor, fee-on-transfer tokens, and inflation attacks on share-based vaults.
- Signature and replay issues: missing nonces, chain-id omissions, and malleable signatures accepted as authorization.
- Front-running and MEV exposure: transaction ordering that lets a third party extract value from users or the protocol.
- Unchecked external calls and denial of service: failed calls treated as success, unbounded loops, and griefing paths that lock funds.
How to prepare for a smart contract audit
- Builds and tests run cleanly from a fresh checkout.
- The codebase is stable, with no major refactors planned mid-audit.
- Architecture, trust assumptions, and permissions are documented.
- Core fund flows are covered by tests, and known limitations are written down.
- Scope is clearly defined: which contracts, which commit, and which deployments.
- If you are mid-build, we can start with a readiness review to lock scope and reduce rework.
Other pages
- Blockchain security Our full blockchain practice, from contracts to nodes and bridges.
- Blockchain and AI security in one engagement When an agent or model can move funds.
- Blockchain infrastructure audit
- Secure code review
- Continuous security review
- Platforms we support
- Languages we support
- Methodology
- Sample audit report
Questions
- How long does a smart contract audit take?
- It depends on code size, complexity, and how much of the system is novel. A single token or vault contract takes days; a full protocol with upgradeable contracts, oracles, and cross-chain messaging takes weeks. We give you a fixed timeline once we have read the scope.
- How much does a smart contract audit cost?
- Pricing is based on lines of code, architectural complexity, the languages and chains involved, and your timeline. Share the repo and scope on the request form and we return a fixed quote with the audit plan.
- How do I prepare for an audit?
- Freeze the code you want reviewed, make sure builds and tests pass, document the architecture and who holds which permissions, and define the scope down to the commit. Good preparation cuts both audit time and cost.
- What happens if vulnerabilities are found?
- Each finding is reported as soon as it is confirmed, with severity, impact, and recommended fix. Your team remediates, we re-test the fixes, and the final report records each issue as resolved, mitigated, or acknowledged with your rationale.
- What is included in a smart contract audit report?
- Scope and commit hashes, a system overview and threat model, the methodology applied, every finding with severity and remediation status, proof-of-concept scenarios for severe issues, fuzz and invariant results where applied, and severity definitions. You can publish it or share it privately with partners and exchanges.
Next step
Request an audit
Share your repo, scope, and timeline. Tell us which chains and languages you use and whether any automation or AI agent can move funds, and we will propose an audit plan and estimate.