Contract review

Contract Review (deep) (A04:2025)

What this checks

Bugs that only resolve across both sides of a contract — a helper whose body guarantees less than callers assume. security-review pattern-matches 45 OWASP/LLM categories; this exists for what that misses. Nightly CI or manual audits; not per-PR.

Vulnerable patterns

Deliberately none. Pattern lists bias the search; contract-audit uses one open question per hotspot — what does the caller assume that the body doesn't enforce? — and the orchestrator does not inspect code.

Procedure

Use the Agent tool to dispatch subagents. Don't audit yourself. Keep state in conversation memory; don't write files.

Stage 0 — Threat model

Dispatch one threat-modeling subagent. Keep its JSON in conversation context; thread it into every later subagent.

Stage 1 — Hotspot seed

Dispatch one hotspot-mapping subagent with the threat model JSON. It scans the whole repo and returns a list of {file, lines, name, category, priority, why} entries — interesting functions to audit. Keep that list in conversation memory.

Stage 2 — Round loop

Track two things in conversation memory:

• probed: a mapping from hotspot key to the count of prior rounds
• refuted[hotspot]: per-hotspot list of REFUTED (impl, caller, gap) triples from prior rounds

While stop conditions not met:

1. Pick the hotspot with the fewest entries in probed (ties: order in the seed list).
2. Dispatch one contract-audit subagent with the threat model JSON, Hotspot:, Why:, Round:, and the refuted[hotspot] block. The threat model informs reachability of the caller path (untrusted-input-reachable → real severity; trusted-only → Low).
3. Parse the <soundcheck-contract> trailer. Append every VERIFIED hypothesis to an in-memory findings list, copying every field verbatim (including guards_traced and any other fields the auditor emitted), and adding hotspot_key and round annotations. Append every REFUTED to refuted[hotspot].
4. Increment probed[hotspot].
5. Update stagnation counter. Reset on VERIFIED; else increment.

Stop conditions (in priority order):

• rounds_done >= max_rounds
• wall-clock > max_hours
• stagnation ≥ stagnation_limit
• every hotspot has emitted reason: exhausted once

Stage 3 — Render

Output is a human-readable Markdown report. Emit in this order:

1. # Contract Review heading.
2. Findings table sorted by severity (Critical → Low): | Severity | Impl | Caller | Gap | Trigger |. Zero findings: skip the table; write No contract gaps found across N hotspots, R rounds.
3. Per-finding details — one ### <Severity>: <impl> ↔ <caller> heading each, then gap, trigger, and a short guards_traced summary as prose. This is what reviewers actually read.
4. Summary line: N findings across M hotspots, R rounds (stopped: <reason>).

Verification

• Markdown findings table is present (or the "No contract gaps found" line when empty)
• Per-finding details section is present (one heading per finding)
• Each row's severity, impl, caller, gap, trigger match the details block below
• No files written; output is prose only

References

• CWE-435 (Improper Interaction Between Multiple Correctly-Behaving Entities)
• CWE-345 (Insufficient Verification of Data Authenticity)
• CWE-820 (Missing Synchronization)
• OWASP A04:2025 — Insecure Design