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DoctorOetkertoday at 10:40 AM0 repliesview on HN

So this is very good news and was predictable.

LLM's are capable of producing code that passes formal verification.

The writing is on the wall: in the future more and more software on the abstract or platonic side of our computing base will be hermetically sealed against bugs and exploits. This quenching of bugs in the assured side will shift the mean location of bugs closer to the hardware side: at some point bugs and exploits will rely more and more on hardware quirks, and simply unspecified hardware.

Afterwards we can expect a long exponential decay of preventable safety violations: people mistakenly or surreptitiously disengaging the formal verification steps and shipping malicious or unverified code. Each such event will be its own big or small scandal, at some point there will be no deniability left: something must be on purpouse, either a malicious vulnerability or intentional disengagement of safety measures.

As the attack surface recedes towards the lower level hardware stack, it will open the debate that the community needs proper formal hardware descriptions (at least at the interface initially, not necessarily how the hardware has implemented it). As interface bugs get formalized 3 things can happen:

either vulnerabilities go extinct, and full formal hardware descriptions are not released

or vulnerabilities remain in each new generation of hardware, and malicious intent or negligence on behalf of the manufacturer can only be presumed, this will set up the community against manufacturers, as they demand full hardware descriptions (verilog, VHDL,...).

or vulnerabilities are tactically applied (vulnerabilities appear extinct to the bulk of the population, but only because manufactured vulnerabilities are sparingly exploited by the manufacturing block)

It is hard to predict what is more valuable: embedding HW vulnerabilities for the status quo and being able to exploit it for while before the public demands full hardware IP descriptions (verilog, VHDL) etc. or facing the end of vulnerabilities a little sooner but keeping hardware IP private (if the bugs stop with full interface descriptions).