Central Banks & CBDC — CBDC security assessment is the independent technical review of a central bank digital currency or wholesale settlement system — issuance and redemption authority, the tiered distribution model, privacy architecture, offline capability and operational resilience — where the failure modes are national in scale and the assurance requirements are correspondingly formal.
A CBDC or wholesale settlement platform inverts most assumptions of public blockchain security. Availability may matter more than confidentiality; the operator is trusted by design and must still be constrained; privacy is a policy requirement expressed in cryptography; and the adversary set includes well-resourced state actors alongside ordinary fraud. The security work has to be rigorous and it has to be independent, because the institution cannot assure itself.
The architecture questions come first and matter most. Where does issuance authority live and what technically prevents its misuse, including by insiders. How does the tiered model constrain intermediaries — what can a distributing bank do to a holder's balance, and what stops it. What does the privacy design actually guarantee, as opposed to what the policy paper says, and does the transaction graph leak what the design intended to protect. What happens when a component is unavailable, when an offline device is compromised, and when the system must be recovered.
We work in the mode these programmes require: formal scope, documented methodology, named and vetted personnel, evidence retained to an agreed standard, and findings written so that both the technical team and the oversight body can act on them. We are a technical assurance provider — we assess whether the implementation delivers the properties the design promises, and we make no policy recommendations about whether a CBDC should exist or how it should be governed.
We fix a commit hash, agree the in-scope contracts and read your architecture docs, then build a threat model: who the actors are, what the trust boundaries are, and which invariants must never break. Nothing is reviewed against assumptions we have not written down.
Line-by-line review by at least two auditors working independently, focused on authorisation, accounting, upgrade paths, external integrations and the gap between what the code does and what the documentation claims it does. Most critical findings come from this phase, not from tooling.
Static analysers appropriate to the language, plus property-based fuzzing and invariant testing to push the system into states no unit test covers. Tooling is used to widen coverage, never to replace the manual pass.
Candidate findings are proven on a forked network with a working proof of concept. We report what an attacker can actually do and what it costs them, not a theoretical severity label.
Every finding gets a severity rating, reproduction steps, the affected code, the impact in concrete terms and a specific remediation. You get a draft for discussion before anything is finalised.
We re-test every remediation against the original proof of concept and check that the fix has not opened a new path. The final report is yours to publish.
We work with institutions running wholesale settlement, tokenized deposit and CBDC pilots, under formal procurement, vetted personnel and strict confidentiality terms. Tell us the programme stage and procurement route and we will tell you honestly whether we fit.
Substantially. Availability and integrity outrank most other properties, the trusted operator must still be technically constrained, privacy is a formal requirement rather than a feature, and the assurance process itself must withstand oversight scrutiny.
Yes, and that is where the highest value is. Design-stage review of issuance authority, the tiered model, privacy architecture and offline capability costs a fraction of changing them after a pilot has run.
Vetted named personnel only, access limited to what the scope requires, evidence held in systems you approve, and return or destruction of all material on completion under the terms you set.
Yes. We assess whether the implemented system provides the privacy properties the policy describes, including transaction graph and metadata leakage and the technical conditions under which identification is possible.
A repository or contract address, a commit hash to freeze the scope, whatever architecture or spec documentation exists, and a point of contact who can answer design questions. If documentation is thin we will write our understanding of the system back to you and ask you to confirm it — that step alone catches design-level bugs.
A single token contract is 24–48 hours. A typical dApp or mid-sized protocol runs one to two weeks. Large DeFi systems, L2s, bridges and ZK circuits are scoped per project after we have seen the code. We will give you a fixed timeline with the quote, not an estimate that moves.
Send the repository and a commit hash through the contact form, message @bugtester25 on Telegram, or book a 30-minute scoping call. 200+ protocols audited · $4B+ secured · 0 hacks post-audit. Prefer email? info@safeedges.in.