A smart contract audit protects the protocol. A private key audit protects the treasury.
While the Web3 industry heavily focuses on auditing Solidity smart contracts, the most devastating institutional losses stem from failures in private key management. Flawed random number generators (RNG), poorly executed key generation ceremonies, and insider threats frequently lead to catastrophic treasury drains.
Our security engineers transition from code to infrastructure, conducting rigorous assessments of how your organization generates, stores, accesses, and revokes access to the cryptographic keys that secure your enterprise liquidity.
Comprehensive Assessment Pillars
Our methodology evaluates your custody architecture across four distinct layers of physical and digital security.
1. Key Generation & Entropy
We verify that your initial key generation relies on true, cryptographically secure random number generation (CSPRNG).
- Entropy source validation
- Air-gapped Key Ceremony review
- BIP39 / BIP32 derivation paths
2. Hardware & Storage (HSM)
Analysis of how the generated keys are stored at rest, ensuring they cannot be extracted via logical or physical exploits.
- FIPS 140-2 Level 3/4 compliance
- Multi-sig quorum configuration
- MPC (Multi-Party Computation) sharding
3. Access & Authorization
Evaluation of the policies required to sign a transaction, mitigating the risk of a single point of failure or a rogue employee.
- Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)
- Transaction whitelisting & rate limits
- Insider threat modeling
4. Disaster Recovery
Auditing the backup procedures to ensure funds can be safely recovered in the event of hardware failure, facility loss, or personnel changes.
- Geographic redundancy testing
- Key revocation protocols
- Mnemonic phrase vaulting procedures
Built for Institutional Custodians
Regulatory bodies and institutional LPs require rigorous, third-party validation of your custody infrastructure before deploying capital.
Centralized Exchanges (CEX)
Securing hot and cold wallet transitions, withdrawal APIs, and multisig corporate treasuries.
Hedge Funds & Family Offices
Ensuring self-custody setups are resilient against targeted physical attacks and digital extortion.
DeFi Foundations
Auditing the admin keys, timelocks, and multisig governance controls that manage protocol upgrades.
BaaS Providers
Validating the multi-tenant architecture and MPC logic of Blockchain-as-a-Service platforms.
Certify Your Infrastructure
Connect with our security engineering team to outline the scope of your custody architecture and schedule a formal Private Key Audit.
Contact TRM Labs Engineering