Empirical Study of Move Smart Contract Security: Introducing MoveScan for Enhanced Analysis

Move, a programming language for smart contracts, stands out for its focus on security. However, the practical security efficacy of Move contracts remains an open question. This work conducts the first comprehensive empirical study on the security of Move contracts. Our initial step involves collaborating with a security company to manually audit 652 contracts from 92 Move projects. This process reveals eight types of defects, with half previously unreported. These defects present potential security risks, cause functional flaws, mislead users, or waste computational resources. To further evaluate the prevalence of these defects in real-world Move contracts, we present MoveScan, an automated analysis framework that translates bytecode into an intermediate representation (IR), extracts essential meta-information, and detects all eight defect types. By leveraging MoveScan, we uncover 97,028 defects across all 37,302 deployed contracts in the Aptos and Sui blockchains, indicating a high prevalence of defects. Experimental results demonstrate that the precision of MoveScan reaches 98.85%, with an average project analysis time of merely 5.45 milliseconds. This surpasses previous state-of-the-art tools MoveLint, which exhibits an accuracy of 87.50% with an average project analysis time of 71.72 milliseconds, and Move Prover, which has a recall rate of 6.02% and requires manual intervention. Our research also yields new observations and insights that aid in developing more secure Move contracts.