A Pattern-Oriented Ontology and Workflow Modeling Approach for the Sui Move Programming Language

Smart contracts are vulnerable to critical, design-level Business Logic Flaws (BLFs) that conventional analysis tools often fail to detect. To address this semantic gap, this study introduces and validates a novel ontological framework designed to formally model the link between high-level architectural intent and low-level code. The methodology involved constructing a multi-layered framework that integrates a comprehensive formal ontology of the Sui Move language, a library of secure design patterns, and process-aware Object-Centric Dynamic Condition Response (OC-DCR) graphs to specify expected behavior. The framework’s representational adequacy was validated by demonstrating its ability to accurately and comprehensively model secure, canonical implementations of four patterns (Access Control, Circuit Breaker, Time Incentivization, and Escapability), drawn from the official Sui Framework and documentation. This validation confirms the framework provides a robust, machine-readable model that captures a diverse range of security, economic, and temporal logic found inside these official implementations. By establishing this formal descriptive model, our work provides the essential semantic foundation for a future generation of tools for pattern-aware auditing and runtime anomaly detection, contributing a comprehensive basis for engineering more verifiable and resilient decentralized applications.