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Nexus Intelligence Research
Nexus Intelligence Research

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DeFi Smart Contract Vulnerabilities Audit Guide

Here are three common DeFi smart contract vulnerabilities, complete with specific mechanisms of how they occur and concrete methods for detecting them.


1. Reentrancy

  • What it is: Reentrancy occurs when an external contract calls back into the calling contract before the first invocation is finished. This allows an attacker to repeatedly execute a function (usually a withdrawal) before the contract's state (like user balances) is updated. The most famous historical example of this is the 2016 DAO hack.

  • Specific Mechanism:
    In Solidity, if you use low-level .call() to send ETH to an untrusted address before updating the ledger (e.g., balances[msg.sender] = 0), the receiving contract can catch that ETH transfer, execute a fallback function, and call withdraw() again. Because the balance hasn't been zeroed out yet, the contract pays out a

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