[Submitted on 2 Dec 2025 (v1), last revised 24 Jul 2026 (this version, v3)]

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Abstract:Move is a resource-oriented programming language designed for secure and verifiable smart contract development and has been widely used in managing billions of digital assets in blockchains, such as Sui and this http URL features a strong static type system and explicit resource semantics to enforce safety properties such as the prevention of data races, invalid asset transfers, and entry vulnerabilities. However, smart contracts written in Move may still contain certain vulnerabilities that are beyond the reach of its type system. It is thus essential to validate Move smart contracts. Unfortunately, due to its strong type system, existing smart contract fuzzers are ineffective in producing syntactically or semantically valid transactions to test Move smart contracts.
This paper introduces the first fuzzing framework, Belobog, for Move smart contracts. Belobog is type-aware and ensures that all generated and mutated transactions are well-typed. More specifically, for a target Move smart contract, Belobog first constructs a dependency graph based on Move's type system, and then generates or mutates a transaction based on the graph trace derived from the dependency graph. In order to overcome the complex checks in Move smart contracts, we further design and implement a concolic executor in Belobog.
We evaluated Belobog on 109 real-world Move smart contract projects. The experimental results show that Belobog is able to detect 100% critical and 79% major vulnerabilities manually audited by human experts. We further selected two recent notorious incidents in the Move ecosystem, i.e., Cetus and Nemo. Belobog successfully reproduced full exploits for both of them, without any prior knowledge. Moreover, we applied Belobog on three ongoing auditing projects and found 2 critical, 2 major, and 3 medium new vulnerabilities, all acknowledged by the project developers.

Submission history

From: Ziqiao Kong [view email]
[v1] Tue, 2 Dec 2025 16:36:13 UTC (348 KB)
[v2] Fri, 30 Jan 2026 12:05:45 UTC (328 KB)
[v3] Fri, 24 Jul 2026 10:47:00 UTC (361 KB)