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Posted by ilreb 3 hours ago

AlphaProof Code(deepmind.google)
340 points | 117 commentspage 2
0o777 2 hours ago|
Do I understand correctly that they verified the entire libsignal Rust library and not just a human-written spec of the Signal protocol?

Also I noticed something in the libsignal repo:

>attest: Functionality for remote attestation of SGX enclaves and server-side HSMs

https://github.com/signalapp/libsignal

How trusted are Intel's (SGX) and AMD's hardware level security features?

Cloudflare runs their edge network in random ISP datacenters and in shady jurisdictions and promise AMD's TSME is enough to keep things secure.

buckle8017 2 hours ago||
SGX is certainly completely broken.

Use s real password with the signal account thing.

fragmede 2 hours ago||
I mean, you setup a webcam at the top of your rented Colo rack space so that you know when the feds come to take your server to hack the SGX/equivalent.
ctrlaltdileep 2 hours ago||
This is pretty cool. I appreciate that they reintroduced security bugs into the implementation to confirm that their process was actually catching issues. I feel like so many "look what AI did!" articles these days focus on the fact that AI did something and not about whether it did it correctly or not. Nevertheless I hope we will get more reliable libraries and dependencies out of this.
sim04ful 2 hours ago||
Curious question, in this case for verification they ported the software into a formal mathematical model. Why can't software development start from the other end instead ? Start with a formal model with the properties you want, then translate it into software.
viraptor 2 hours ago|
You can. It ends up really slow normally which is why we don't do it. For example for a proven Deflate, it took an hour to process a 1MB file https://ar5iv.labs.arxiv.org/html/1609.01220
tylerhou 1 hour ago|||
That’s not a great source to support your claim. From the paper

> The resolution (decompression) of such backreferences in an imperative context is trivial, but uses lots of invariants that make it hard to prove correct. In a purely functional context, it is non-trivial to find data structures that are fast enough. We decided to stick with purely functional algorithms, as they can be verified directly using Coq, and optimization of purely functional programs is interesting for its own sake. In our current verified implementation, this is the slowest part. The benchmarks in Appendix 0.A support this claim. We already have figured out an algorithm with better performance, but we are not yet done proving it formally correct; we will not get deeper into this algorithm in this paper.

There are many ways verify programs; the authors of your linked paper just chose a method that resulted in a slow binary. Alternatively, one can build a model of an imperative language (C) and prove that an imperative programs meets some specification.

creata 2 hours ago|||
There was recently a decently fast implementation of DEFLATE in Lean: https://kim-em.github.io/blog/2026-7-24-why-lean-is-faster-t...
fefaOd 1 hour ago||
Saving man-hours is a big deal. Progress opens more and more doors, the main thing is not to open the last one.
hmokiguess 3 hours ago||
From the paper: https://google-deepmind.github.io/code-verification/
beernet 2 hours ago||
>> AlphaProof Code is a multi-LLM agentic framework that splits the work of formal verification the way a research team would

Not sure if this is precise. At least it sounds somewhat odd. I think what they really wanted to say here is "multi-agent system" (which usually, but not necessarily, implies the use of multiple LLMs).

pvab3 2 hours ago||
Isn't this kind of a major blow to human software developers? Now code can be generated and tested independently of human expertise, both much faster than a human could.
mapcars 2 hours ago||
Tested is one thing, proved is another. While you need less people to do this, now it also becomes meaningful to spend resources on, instead of another new feature.
ngruhn 2 hours ago||
I think we're well past that point anyway
whattheheckheck 3 hours ago||
How do you prove the lean code represents what the code its proving?
throwaway198846 3 hours ago||
I hope it will be possible to verify CPUs soon as well. Of course that is much harder because they are not open source and physical and you need to simulate physics to verify them fully.
utopiah 3 hours ago|
some are https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/precursor caugh CPU-ish
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