# The Move Borrow Checker

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.05181 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.05181/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 10 May 2022.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Securing Smart Contract Languages with a Unified Agentic Framework for Vulnerability Repair in Solidity and Move](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.18515/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The Move language provides abstractions for programming with digital assets via a mix of value semantics and reference semantics. Ensuring memory safety in programs with references that access a shared, mutable global ledger is difficult, yet essential for the use-cases targeted by Move. The language meets this challenge with a novel memory model and a modular, intraprocedural static reference safety analysis that leverages key properties of the memory. The analysis ensures the absence of memory safety violations in all Move programs (including ones that link against untrusted code) by running as part of a load-time bytecode verification pass similar to the JVM [12] and CLR [15]. We formalize the static analysis and prove that it enjoys three desirable properties: absence of dangling references, referential transparency for immutable references, and absence of memory leaks.