Smart Contract Security: A Lifecycle, Not an Audit

Specify invariants

Define what must always remain true: asset conservation, access controls, limits, state transitions and emergency conditions.

Threat model

Consider privileged roles, external calls, price oracles, bridges, upgrade mechanisms, denial of service and economic manipulation.

Test beyond unit cases

Use integration, property, fuzz and adversarial testing where appropriate, and test failure paths as seriously as success paths.

Control deployment

Use reproducible builds, reviewed configuration, role separation, multisig or policy controls and documented upgrade authority.

Monitor production

Track events, abnormal state, privileged actions and dependencies. Prepare pause, recovery, communication and post-incident processes.