Ethereum (@ethereum): 5/ Why is formal verification becoming more important, now?

5/ Why is formal verification becoming more important, now? Besides being more feasible than before, it’s actually crucial to cybersecurity – advances in AI make it easier to produce exploits. For instance, an unreleased model at OpenAI recently discovered 0-day exploits to break through multiple layers of security. Formal verification shifts the asymmetry towards defenders. While attackers only need to find one sequence of inputs which lets them break (into) a system, defenders can use formal verification to prove robustness against *all* inputs. For mission-critical software like smart contracts where billions of user funds are at stake, formal verification is becoming a prerequisite, not an option.