When developers or investors hear "smart contract audit," they often picture a single automated scan that generates a PDF. A real security audit is far more comprehensive — and understanding what it includes helps you evaluate audit quality and make informed decisions about your security posture.
Phase 1: Scoping and documentation review
Before a single line of code is reviewed, auditors need to understand what the contract is supposed to do. This phase includes reviewing:
- The project whitepaper and technical specification.
- Architecture diagrams and trust models.
- Known assumptions and intentional design decisions (e.g., "this function is intentionally public").
- Previous audit reports and known issues.
Without this context, auditors cannot distinguish bugs from intentional behavior — which leads to false positives in the final report.
Phase 2: Automated static analysis
Auditors run industry-standard tools like Slither, Mythril, and Solhint to scan for known vulnerability patterns. This phase is fast and catches obvious issues: unchecked return values, tx.origin authentication, integer overflows in older compilers, and more.
Phase 3: Manual code review
This is the most labor-intensive and high-value phase. Experienced auditors read every line of code with adversarial intent — asking "how could an attacker exploit this?" Key areas of focus include:
- Access control: Is every sensitive function protected by the right checks?
- State machine correctness: Are state transitions valid? Can an attacker skip steps?
- Arithmetic: Are there overflow, underflow, or precision loss risks?
- External interactions: Does the contract handle failing external calls correctly? Is the reentrancy attack surface fully protected?
- Economic logic: Could the incentive structure be gamed? Are there flash loan attack vectors?
Phase 4: Economic and protocol-level analysis
For DeFi protocols, the most dangerous bugs often aren't code bugs at all — they're design flaws that allow economic manipulation. This phase models attack scenarios like oracle manipulation, liquidity attacks, and governance takeovers.
Phase 5: Report writing
A professional audit report includes:
- Executive summary: Overall risk rating, number of findings by severity, and key recommendations.
- Findings: Each issue documented with severity (Critical/High/Medium/Low/Informational), description, impact, affected code, and recommended fix.
- Code quality notes: Suggestions for improving maintainability and gas efficiency.
- Appendix: Scope definition, methodology, and tool outputs.
Phase 6: Remediation and re-audit
After the development team applies fixes, the audit firm re-reviews all changed code to verify that findings are properly resolved and that no new issues were introduced. This step is often skipped with cheaper audits — which is why you should always ask whether re-review is included in the scope.
What AI audits provide
AI-powered audit platforms like SmartContract.us automate phases 2–3 and parts of phase 4, producing a structured report with findings, severity ratings, and recommendations in under a minute. AI audits are an excellent first pass and are sufficient for lower-stakes contracts. They are not a replacement for a professional manual audit on contracts handling significant user funds.
Want to see what an AI audit report looks like? Run a free analysis on any contract address — no signup required.