A Model-Checking Framework for the Verification of Move Smart Contracts

Abstract

As the popularity of distributed ledger technology and smart contracts continues to grow, so does the number of decentralized applications and their potential exposure to expensive exploits. The need for strong vulnerability detection tools is critical. Move is a recently developed smart contract language with safety and security at the core of its design containing formal verification tools embedded into the language. Currently, these tools can only verify local properties within a single Move function. They cannot verify global properties that result from multiple function executions. In this paper, we introduce VeriMove, an extension of the VeriSolid correct-by-design model checking framework that supports the Move language. We show that model checking is a feasible method to formally verify global properties in Move smart contracts.