One of the main reasons BenFen adopted Move as its smart contract language is its strong built-in safety guarantees, especially its native support for formal verification.
What is Formal Verification? Formal verification is the process of using mathematical methods to prove that code behaves exactly as intended, under all possible inputs and states. Unlike unit tests, which only check specific scenarios, formal verification can confirm the absence of entire classes of vulnerabilities.
How Is It Applied in BenFen?
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Move Specification Language (MSL): Developers can write formal specifications for their contracts using MSL, including preconditions, postconditions, and invariants.
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Move Prover: BenFen provides built-in support for tools like Move Prover. Once a developer defines the expected behavior using MSL, Prover attempts to mathematically prove that the contract adheres to these rules in all situations. If it fails, it produces a counterexample that identifies a potential bug or vulnerability.
By encouraging and enabling formal verification, BenFen empowers developers to identify and fix deep, logic-level vulnerabilities before deployment. This significantly strengthens the security of the overall ecosystem.