Overall I think it was a decent attempt at my first real try at auditing, and The Standard was a good starting protocol I would say, there are a lot of things which I could've done better. From my audit process, to my own time management.
I took inspiration from a fellow security researcher known as @Flint_14si2o, where they had tracked productive hours to track progress and hold yourself accountable. It has been working, but there are days where it wasn't as good, but we move on and keep grinding it out!
So what did I do right?
I think one of the things I think went really well for me was the abstraction and visualization of the protocol on a high level. It didn't take me all that long to fully understand what was happening within the protocol. And that really did help when I was going through the code and putting the pieces together.
Putting things together and trying to visualize things better for The Standard Contest on @CodeHawks .
Having a good mental model of what's happening during the standard contest really helped, I'll probably continue to create diagrams like this for myself.
Another thing I was happy with is how I compiled all of the resources and concepts together within my own notes, this helped when there were terms or concepts that I wasn't very familiar with. I mainly used Obsidian for it so it was very fast and lightweight, even easier to manage if things are in order.
I will for certain keep using Obsidian to organize more notes and things that I've learned in the future, has been a pretty good experience so far.
So what can I improve?
A key area for me would be to maintain my hours, while also having them be more efficient and productive. There's no point in doing 12 hours of work while I'm not focused, so we diving in and focusing more.
I also realised that, while I did get a good understanding of everything during the contest, I did spend too much time doing that, and not enough time testing and writing reports. So in the end it was actually quite rushed. So this probably goes back to how I spend and manage my time better.
We move on to the next!
This month has so many competitions, so we continue, and we get good.