Near Audit Smart Contracts – Full Guide

NEAR Protocol is a blockchain that can rival Ethereum by exploiting the protocol’s biggest drawback, its lack of scalability, using something called sharding. This allows it to exponentially increase its scalability and maintain high Near security.

NEAR uses the Near Protocol, a PoS blockchain known for its openness, developer friendliness, and segmentation. The protocol is a low-cost and highly scalable platform developers can use to build decentralized applications.

Near Smart Contract Audit Process and Tools

The Near smart contract audits are carried out according to a standard procedure and may vary slightly for different audit companies. The following are typical Near smart contract auditing services.

1. Data Collection

A smart contract is a piece of code stored on a blockchain. This helps the auditors understand the project’s objectives and determine its scope. This stage is the starting point for the entire audit process, as a large amount of information is processed to start the work of potential auditors.

2. Selecting Audit Methods and Running Tests for Near Smart Contracts

A manual audit involves a team of auditors reviewing each line of code for compilation and re-typing issues. It can also help detect other often overlooked security vulnerabilities, such as inefficient coding practices. Since this method allows you to see hidden defects, it is considered the most accurate and complete.

Because manual auditing is more efficient, audit firms often audit smart contracts without the help of software. With this approach, you can effectively detect such vulnerabilities designed for a person and his actions in a particular situation. Most application developers use standard rules to detect vulnerabilities in the audit request form or application code.

The auditors test the project to check each interesting smart contract auditors’ function of the contracts. Audit professionals use various tools (both manual and automated) to ensure that tests validate all smart contract codes.

When testing to identify vulnerabilities in applications, multiple methods are used, mainly static and dynamic code analyzers. The most popular fuzzing is gray box testing. Prominent representatives of such fuzzes are AFL and AFL Fast. The gray box method provides access to the internal structure and algorithms of the software for other writing test cases.

3. Formation Of The Audit Report

After the audit, a preliminary report is made so the project team can correct the detected errors and vulnerabilities. Some smart contract service providers have a team of experts to help fix every bug they find.

Once the errors are corrected, a final report is submitted to the smart contract auditor, taking into account any actions taken by the team. Audit reports can be regular, which is often the case for large projects or final. In any case, this stage will be useful for enhancing ecosystem security.

4. Near Security Audit Tools: Securify and Gasper

Securify tool provides smart contract validation automation, a guarantee to detect specific vulnerabilities, and extensibility to capture any newly discovered vulnerabilities. Securify uses formal verification but also uses static code analysis. In addition, Securify covers smart contract security issues: transaction redistribution, recursive calls, insecure coding patterns, etc. This is one of the many auditors’ tools, but experience is just as important.

Also, in smart contract security auditing, auditing companies often use Gasper. This tool generates test inputs based on the application binary interface of the smart contract under test. It generates a set of seven test oracles to detect the following vulnerabilities: gasless submission, reentry, timestamp dependency, and external call vulnerability.

Why Auditing Smart Contracts on Near Protocol is Important

A general-purpose programming language on the blockchain platform makes it possible to implement a wide range of decentralized applications. However, on the other hand, such applications enable attackers to use them for selfish purposes.

The audit should be carried out by specialists with experience in information security and software development since this is not just ordinary data on a hard drive but a whole network of chains and conditions. As a rule, audit services provide the following range of services:

• Analyze smart contracts in conjunction with the front and back end. They also analyze for errors in the logic of the contract.
• Analyze backdoors and inconsistencies with the behavior stated in the whitepaper.
• The audit is carried out by specialists with ten years of experience in information security and software development.

Near Smart Contract: Features and Applications

Near is open source, and anyone can start contributing to its development. The Blockchain platform has raised nearly $350 million in investment, cementing itself as an important player in the market.

NEAR is a scalable sharded blockchain. Smart contracts are compiled into WebAssembly (WASM) and can be written in the following languages:

• Rust (for financial applications)
• AssemblyScript (JavaScript syntax)
• Solidity (via Aurora EVM)
• Javascript (via JS-VM)

The use of WASM achieves high gas limit/efficiency, fast block generation, and reduced transaction fees. Smart contracts in NEAR can be considered micro-services containing data and executable code. Cross-contract interactions are performed asynchronously.

Last Words About Near Protocol Audit

The NEAR Protocol is faster and cheaper than other players in the crypto space. Using sharding, NEAR offers solutions to problems such as slow processing speed, network congestion, and high gas charges, allowing for significant platform scalability without sacrificing protocol security. Moreover, a smart contract audit program will be created for this case and trusted security partners would also be happy to work regularly. Interested smart contract auditors will always be glad to help you and your project.

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