Fiinu Token Audit

The Fiinu team asked us to review and audit their Fiinu Token (FNU) and crowdsale contracts. We looked at the code and now publish our results.

The audited contracts are located in the fiinu/smart-contract repository. The version used for this report is the commit 7589b9d137bbf902e142e4f0476b06976e390bdb.

Here’s our assessment and recommendations, in order of importance.

Update: The Fiinu team has followed most of our recommendations and updated the contracts. The new version is at commit 548e5ed6812da14623eeb30be64eee9bc45edb48.

Critical Severity

Unbounded loops

There are several loops in the contract which can eventually grow so large as to make future operations of the contract cost too much gas to fit in a block. Additionally, using unbounded loops incurs in a lot of avoidable gas costs for all token transactions.

As an example, there is a state variable allFNUHolders which holds an array with the addresses of all token holders. When an address becomes a token holder, it is added to this array. Whenever an address is left with balance zero after a transfer, the array is iterated over to find the address and remove it (removeAddress). If the array is large enough, the iteration could cost too much gas and it would be impossible to make a transfer function call.

Additionally to addAddress and removeAddress, the allFNUHolders array is iterated in the shareProfits function, to assign each token holder their corresponding profit in the allProfitHolders array. The same unbounded loop problem applies. This kind of imperative code-style is not a good fit for Ethereum smart contracts.

To fix this problem the two arrays have to be removed, and the profit sharing feature completely redesigned.

One suggestion for implementing these features securely is calculating the profits “on demand” for each token holder, instead of ahead of time for all of them. This would require the token to support taking a snapshot of all balances at the time profits are loaded into the smart contract. It might be worth considering using the MiniMe Token for this.

Update: The token was migrated to use MiniMe Token, and the profit sharing functionality was reimplemented to use its features and avoid the problems mentioned here.

Delayed price increase after target amount raised

The token price is meant to start increasing after the target amount of 100,000 ETH has been raised. However, due to the ordering of integer divisions the price doesn’t increase until actually 200,000 ETH have been raised. Line 207 reads _wei.div(raisedWei.div(targetRaiseWei)): notice that raisedWei.div(targetRaiseWei) will be 1 until raisedWei is 2*targetRaiseWei, and the price adjustment won’t be made until then.

Replace the expression in line 207 for _wei.mul(targetRaiseWei).div(raisedWei) to achieve the desired price adjustment.

Update: Fixed as suggested in 91ff77c.

High Severity

Staff allocations assigned to placeholder addresses

The staff allocations done in Milestone_ICOSuccessful mint tokens for the addresses 0x01, 0x02, 0x03 and 0x04. These addresses are not owned by anyone and their tokens will not be usable. This might have been a temporary measure until the actual addresses were known, to set them before deploying the contract. In that case, consider adding them as parameters to the constructor, to make it evident that they need to be set.

Update: Fixed in 5295691.

Profit distribution can be reset by owner at any time

There is a function PrepareForProfitShare callable by the owner at any time, which resets the distribution of profits: it brings every token holder’s claimable profits down to zero. It’s not clear what purpose it serves. Consider removing it, as it harms the trustlessness of the contract.

Fiat investments do not respect limits

Investments submitted by the admin via investFIAT do not respect the maxRaiseWei limit. Consider enforcing this by adding require(raisedWei <= maxRaiseWei) at the end of the function.

Update: The function 96e4c50.

Medium Severity

State transition to “successful” doesn’t check raised amount

The state transition from ICOclosed to ICOSuccessful doesn’t check if the crowdsale succeeded or not. Consider adding the line require(raisedWei >= minRaiseWei) in Milestone_ICOSuccessful. Consider also adding similar requirements elsewhere, such as require(raisedWei < minRaiseWei) in Milestone_ICOFailed.

Update: Fixed as suggested in 55f9886.

Low Severity

Lack of events for investments

For auditability purposes, especially given that there is an admin function with potential for abuse (investFIAT), it would be desirable to log events for investments. Consider emitting: 1) in the fallback function an event Investment with beneficiary address, amount of received ETH, and amount of tokens bought; 2) in investFiat an event FiatInvestment with the same data, plus the amount of fiat money invested or exchange rate used.

Update: Fixed as suggested in 040c66c.

Truncation in integer division

The profit sharing mechanism uses integer division to distribute profits proportionally to token holdings: balances[addr].mul(msg.value).div(totalSupply). It must be taken into consideration that integer division truncates the remainder. In this particular case, the amount lost to truncation will be negligible, and is in some sense necessary (you cannot transfer a fraction of a wei). However, a small improvement could be made by letting balances[addr].mul(msg.value) accumulate, and performing the division at the last moment, when the token holder claims his profit shares.

Keep in mind, too, that integer division is used to convert ether amounts to FNU amounts, and that due to truncation some amounts of ether will be received for no FNU compensation.

Possible erroneous Transfer event in transferFrom

In transferFrom it is not checked that the source account has enough balance. This is not severe because, in general, the safe subtraction will revert the transaction if more than the available balance wants to be transferred. However, in the special case that someone calls transferFrom with the source and destination as the same account, the same won’t happen because the balance is first incremented, and only then decremented. The resulting balance will remain the same, but it would be possible for anyone to emit a Transfer event with themselves as destination and an arbitrary amount. This might be misinterpreted for a real transfer by an application or individual. Consider swapping the lines so that the balance is first decremented and then incremented, in order for such a transaction to fail.

Update: Fixed as suggested in 74e1172.

ERC20 compliance

Although a minor problem, the decimals state variable should be defined with type uint8 to be compliant with ERC20.

Additionally, there is a restriction to the usage of approve intended to mitigate a problematic race condition, but it is not ERC20 compliant. Consider removing the line, and including an alternative mitigation.

Update: Fixed in 767b11e.

Notes & Additional Information

  • Consider renaming maxRaiseWei to maxRaisedWei, and the same for minRaiseWei and targetRaiseWei.
  • The members of Milestones.State have inconsistent capitalization, e.g. ICOopen and ICOFailed. Consider making it consistent.
  • The struct type named Whitelist might be more aptly named WhitelistEntry.
  • In manageAdmins, it’s not necessary to make a special case for _add == false, because admins[_address] = false is exactly equivalent to delete admins[_address] (including the gas reimbursement). Consider rewriting the function body simply to admins[_address] = _add. The same goes for manageInvestors.
  • Solidity provides a shorthand notation for writing ETH amounts like 1 ether. Consider using it to define the crowdsale limits (e.g. minRaiseWei = 20000 ether), and elsewhere like in the token fallback function.
  • In the Milestone_* functions in the token contract (Milestone_ICOSuccessful and Milestone_BankLicenseFailed) it’s not necessary to repeat the inState modifiers. They will be handled by the call to super.
  • It’s not a problem for the current token because the functions always return true, but when overriding transfer you should respect the return value of the call to super: if it returns false, the failure must be relayed. The same goes for transferFrom.
  • investFIAT adds the investor address to the list of approved investors if it’s not already in it.

Update: Most suggestions were implemented in ba52c70.

Conclusion

Two critical severity and three high severity issues were found and explained, along with recommendations on how to fix them. Some changes were proposed to follow best practices and reduce potential attack surface.

Note that as of the date of publishing, the above review reflects the current understanding of known security patterns as they relate to the Fiinu Token contract. We have not reviewed the related Fiinu project. The above should not be construed as investment advice. For general information about smart contract security, check out our thoughts here.