Making AI Headlines · Page 1
Signal's cryptography gets six million lines of very serious homework
· New York time
Google DeepMind says its AlphaProof Code system mathematically verified the cryptographic core of Signal in four weeks, using Gemini Carbon agents to produce more than six million lines of proof code. The work concerns software that helps protect private communications, making the result relevant far beyond a single engineering team. Formal verification is an unusually demanding kind of checking. Rather than merely seeing whether code appears to work in a selection of tests, a proof aims to establish that specified properties hold. That makes it attractive for security-critical systems, but the work can be painstaking. DeepMind says the process would typically take years and that only about one percent of the proof code was flagged for human review. The company plans to extend the method to critical infrastructure, including power grids and medical devices. The appeal is clear: AI might help specialists tackle more of the mathematical work behind software people depend on. A proof, however, is tied to what is specified and verified, not a universal promise that every aspect of a service is invulnerable. In an industry fond of announcing that AI will do the hard thinking, this is an unusually literal assignment. The machine did not just polish the presentation. It brought six million lines of homework, and some of them still landed on a human desk.
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