Smart contracts act as a differentiator of blockchain technology that makes it greater than any normal decentralized platform for financial activities. But the rising concerns about cybercrime and cybercriminals make the security of smart contracts doubtful.
What Is A Smart Contract?
A smart contract is a modern style of agreement that establishes the terms between the traders like normal agreements. What makes the smart contract terms different is that the terms are executed via code. The global smart contracts industry is expected to have a market size of $345.4 million in 2026.
Security Checklist For Smart Contracts In 2023
Although blockchain is highly secure it is not invincible for cybercriminals and that is why maintaining security becomes significant. Every transaction on blockchain technology is anonymous and that makes fraudsters and scammers more interested in performing criminal activities.
Here is a checklist to optimize the security of smart contracts in 2023 to help the organizations prepare with precautions-
- Stick To Best Practices – The first and most important thing during the development of smart contracts is to go forward with the best and leading practices. The industry-leading practices can be unknown to the contract owners or professionals but the smart contracts developers have to be familiar with those. Best practices like-
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- Utilization of a safe development environment
- Load entire code in a safe control system
- Ensure the code edits are done by pull requests with a minimum of one independent verifier
- Make sure the code gets compiled without any error
- Document the contract code in detail
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- Restrict Access – Considerable numbers of smart contracts’ functions are observed to be public and that is why outer accounts can also utilize them. This interaction does not remain limited to a few areas or regions as it is public. Limiting the smart contracts’ access helps in minimizing the threats from scammers or fraudsters.
- Utilize Proper Function Statements – Several lines of code are integrated into smart contracts; each of these lines are linked with specific functions. Optimized security can be achieved by utilizing the function statements to protect from complicated contract activities.
- Reduce Difficulty – A code with more complexity is always carrying a higher chance of having errors. Having a simple code for smart contracts reduces these error chances and makes the smart contract extra trustworthy.
- Verify The Code- The misconception that a smart contract will perform as planned is not the right way to ensure the security of your Blockchain. A test to verify the code is always the best idea to skip the threats and challenges of a code with errors.
- Third-Party Code Review- In order to ensure security, an independent code review from a third party is highly useful and also suggested by experts. A third party can perform scans that are not in your practice and mark out the unnoticed flaws.
- Protection From Frequent Vulnerabilities – A number of frequent smart contracts vulnerabilities you need to focus on to ensure protection-
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- Reentrancy attacks
- Insecure arithmetic attack
- Access control vulnerabilities
- Gas limit and loop
- Timestamp dependency
- Implicit visibility level
- DOS attacks
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- Prepare A Plan To Recover – All the above-mentioned protection enhancement strategies can fail as well so what will be your role then? You should prepare a recovery ploy in advance, in case a smart contract security hazard really happens.
- Event Tracking – A great retrieval strategy must have event monitoring practice. It can help in tracing calls to smart contract functions and also find differences in the key factors. With event tracking, quickly reacting to any kind of security breach can be possible.
- Emergency Pauses – In case a security hazard really happens and you find an error in your code via emergency pause you can patch the code. But without the emergency pause, patching the code is impossible while it’s running.
- Contract Update – Although blockchain smart contracts cannot be edited using an updated pattern can be the solution to rectify the identified flaws in your code.
The Final Words
Yes, blockchain is a revolution and this revolution is also a result of the high-security standards of smart contracts but as time is changing upgrading is required. Cybercriminals have also scaled up their skills and this is why having a prepared plan is essential for smart contract security in 2023.
