ERC-721 Security

TL:DR just missleading name of function

Intro

The ERC-721 was supposed to have transfer security function to ensure tokens wouldn’t be stuck in recipient contracts that weren't designed to handle them. Safe functions prevent tokens to get stuck that's why we call them safeTransfer. This function may cause reentrancy vunerabilities which means the safeTransfer function in code is not making the contract safe - prevent it from other vunerabilities it's actually unsafeTransfer. This function was initially named as transfer

Full disclosure

"When the ERC-721 standard was being drafted, back in the beginning of 2018, a suggestion was made to implement transfer security to ensure that tokens wouldn't be stuck in recipient contracts that weren't designed to handle them. To do this, the proposal authors modified the behavior of the transfer function to check the recipient for whether they were capable of supporting the token transfer. They also introduced the unsafeTransfer function which would bypass this check, should the sender so desire.

However, due to concerns about backwards compatibility, the functions were renamed in a subsequent commit. This made the transfer function behave the same for both an ERC-20 and an ERC-721 token. However, now the recipient checking needed to be moved elsewhere. As such, the safe class of functions was introduced: safeTransfer and safeTransferFrom.

This was a solution for a legitimate problem, as there have been numerous examples of ERC-20 tokens being accidentally transferred to contracts that never expected to receive tokens (one particularly common mistake was to transfer tokens to the token contract itself, locking it forever). It's no surprise then that when the ERC-1155 standard was being drafted, it took inspiration from the ERC-721 standard by including recipient checks not only on transfer but on mint as well.

These standards mostly sat dormant for the next few years while ERC-20 maintained its popularity, but recently a spike in gas costs, as well as interest in NFTs, means that the ERC-721 and ERC-1155 standards have seen a spike in developer usage. With all this renewed interest, it sure is fortunate that these standards were designed with safety in mind, right?" -Samczsun

Source: https://www.paradigm.xyz/2021/08/the-dangers-of-surprising-code Code: https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/commit/74dadccc858545aa89edaf6ec1cb5857cd261083