POLY Token Contracts Audit

The Polymath team asked us to review and audit their POLY Token contracts. We looked at the code and now publish our results.

The audited code is located in the polymath-token-distribution repository. The version used for this report is commit 672fabe081e8f90ea025252d92c2eb247d60010e.

Here is our assessment and recommendations, in order of importance.
Update: The Polymath team has followed most of our recommendations and updated the contracts. The new version is at commit 0b47ae467f95a02c6b71421e5816b5d50b698158.

Critical Severity

No issues of critical severity.

High Severity

No issues of high severity.

Medium Severity

Possible overflow in loop index variable

The airdropTokens function of the PolyDistribution contract takes an array of addresses as a parameter in order to “airdrop” tokens to each of them. To do so, a for loop is used, with an index variable of type uint8. This will result in an overflow for arrays which have more than 255 addresses. The loop will indefinitely iterate over the first 255 addresses, eventually failing with an out of gas error, wasting gas.
Consider using a uint256 variable for the index.
Update: Fixed in commit 0b47ae4.

Low Severity

Incomplete ERC20 Interface

The IERC20 contract defines the basic interface of a standard token to be used by the PolyToken contract. However, this contract doesn’t follow the ERC20 standard which requires for the totalSupply function to be defined in its public interface.
We recommend dropping this contract in favor of the ERC20 contract from the OpenZeppelin library. If not, consider adding the missing function to the contract to comply with the standard and making this contract an interface as its name and usage suggests.
Update: Contract is now an interface 0b47ae4.

Install OpenZeppelin via NPM

The SafeMath and Ownable contacts were copied from the OpenZeppelin repository, and PolyToken is a copy of the StandardToken contract.
Consider making the PolyToken contract inherit from StandardToken to minimize its logic, and following the recommended way to use OpenZeppelin contracts, which is via the zeppelin-solidity NPM package, allowing for any bugfixes to be easily integrated into the codebase.

No Transfer event for minted tokens

It is recommended, in the ERC20 spec, to emit a Transfer event with the source (_from) set to 0x0 when minting new tokens. This enhances user experience by allowing applications such as Etherscan to learn of the new token holders. In this case this is only relevant for the constructor, where the initial balance is assigned to the distribution contract. Nonetheless, consider emitting the corresponding event: Transfer(0x0, msg.sender, _initialAmount).
Update: Fixed in commit 0b47ae4.

Token distribution address can be null

In the PolyToken constructor, the total supply of the token is granted to the _polyDistributionContractAddress, which as its name suggests, it is expected to be the PolyDistribution contract’s address.
However, this parameter is never inspected nor validated, allowing it to be the 0x0 address, which would make the contract unusable. This goes against the principle of fail early and loudly.
Consider prohibiting the null address as a parameter of the PolyToken constructor.
Update: Fixed in commit 0b47ae4.

Notes & Additional Information

• In the PolyToken and PolyDistribution contracts there are several numbers with too many digits, making them hard to read and error-prone. We recommend replacing them with their scientific notation equivalents. For example, 10e9 for PolyTokens’s totalSupply.
• There is a transfer of tokens in the function
  transferTokens whose return value is unchecked. Even though the token as of now never returns false, it is good practice to not omit the check, as was correctly done
  in the rest of the contract. (Update: Fixed in
  0b47ae4.)

Conclusion

No critical or high severity issues were found. 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 POLY Token contracts. We have not reviewed the related Polymath project. The above should not be construed as investment advice. For general information about smart contract security, check out our thoughts here.