Custodians — Custody security is the review of the systems and processes that hold private keys on behalf of third parties — key generation and ceremony, HSM or MPC architecture, quorum and approval policy, segregation of client assets, and the recovery paths that must work on the worst day — assessed against the possibility that any single person or system in the chain is compromised.
Custody is the one part of this industry where the security model is the product. Clients are not buying software; they are buying the assertion that a key cannot be misused by an outsider, an insider, a vendor or an accident, and that assertion needs to be demonstrable rather than asserted. Our work exists to make it demonstrable.
The technical review goes deep on the cryptographic and architectural core: how keys are generated and whether the entropy and ceremony are sound, how an MPC scheme distributes trust and whether the implementation matches the protocol it claims, how HSM policies constrain signing, and — most importantly — what an operator or engineer with maximum legitimate access can actually cause to happen. In custody, insider capability is the risk model, not an afterthought.
The operational review is equally weighted, because custody failures are usually procedural. Quorum policies that degrade under staff absence, approval workflows with an emergency bypass nobody has tested, backups that contain more than they should, disaster recovery documented but never executed, and client asset segregation that is correct in the database but not in the on-chain address structure. We test the procedures by running them, not by reading them.
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.
A great deal. The vendor's cryptography is one component; your policy configuration, share distribution, operator procedures, approval workflow, recovery process and insider controls are yours, and that is where custody incidents happen.
Yes, and we recommend it. An observed ceremony with an independent record is one of the strongest pieces of evidence a custodian can hold, and it consistently surfaces divergence between the written procedure and actual practice.
Yes. We run recovery against an equivalent environment with test key material, using the same procedures, people and tooling. If the procedure only works when the author is in the room, that is exactly what we want to discover.
It is central to the engagement. We measure what each privileged role can actually reach, whether collusion thresholds hold under real staffing, and whether privileged action logging can be influenced by the people it records.
Yes, and most custodians do. We can produce a summary version suitable for client and counterparty distribution alongside the full technical report.
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.