Safety Properties
Safety properties are the foundational requirements of a system that guarantee that something bad never happens. These properties are essential for maintaining the integrity and security of financial protocols.
A classic example of a safety property in a derivative contract is that the total debt must never exceed the total collateral. If this condition is violated, the system is no longer solvent, and the risk of loss becomes significant.
Safety properties are typically easier to verify than liveness properties because they only need to hold at every individual state of the system. In the context of smart contract security, identifying and enforcing safety properties is the first step in building a secure architecture.
By proving that these properties hold under all reachable states, developers can guarantee that the protocol remains secure against a wide range of exploits. Safety properties form the core of any formal specification, acting as the primary defense against catastrophic failures.