Crypto Exchanges — Exchange security is the review of the systems that hold and move customer assets on a trading venue — custody and signing architecture, deposit crediting, withdrawal authorisation, listing risk, market integrity and the operational controls around them — where a single flaw is an immediate, irreversible, and public loss of customer funds.
Exchanges are the highest-value target in the industry and have been for a decade. The losses are rarely elegant. They come from hot wallets holding far more than daily flow needs, signing infrastructure that will sign any well-formed request, an internal tool reachable from a compromised employee account, a deposit crediting path that trusts an event without verifying finality, or a newly listed token whose contract has a transfer hook nobody read.
We test an exchange the way an attacker approaches one: from the outside in, then from the inside out. External surface first — APIs, authentication, session handling, withdrawal flows, rate limits. Then the assumption that an attacker has a foothold: what does a compromised support account, a compromised engineer laptop, or a malicious insider actually reach? That second question decides whether an incident is a bad week or a terminal event, and it is the one most exchange security programmes have never honestly answered.
Listing risk deserves its own workstream. Every token you list is third-party code your platform now interacts with automatically: fee-on-transfer behaviour, rebasing supply, blacklists, upgradeable logic and mint authority all break exchange accounting in ways that have caused real losses. We provide a listing review process your team can run repeatedly, not just a one-off report.
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.
Reconnaissance and configuration review against production; intrusive testing against a mirrored staging environment; anything disruptive only inside an agreed window with a named contact and rollback plan. No exchange should agree to less.
Yes — and we prefer to leave you with a repeatable listing review process rather than a dependency on us for every asset. High-risk listings can still be escalated to a full audit.
We test from the position that an attacker already has a foothold — a compromised support account, an engineer laptop, a CI credential — because that is how large exchange incidents have actually started. It reliably produces the most valuable findings.
Yes, technically: whether address control is demonstrated, whether liabilities are covered, and whether the snapshot method is resistant to borrowed balances. We are not a financial attestation firm — we assess whether the cryptographic claim holds.
Partly. The custody and withdrawal workstreams do not apply, but listing risk, oracle dependence, front-end integrity and admin authority all do. A DeFi security audit is usually the better starting point.
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.