AI-assisted hacking outpaces traditional code review; NEAR co-founder advocates for formal verification

Odaily Planet Daily News: NEAR Protocol co-founder Illia Polosukhin stated that AI is significantly accelerating hackers' ability to discover software vulnerabilities, making traditional code review models inadequate. He pointed out that the Balancer incident in October last year marked the beginning of AI-assisted hacking, and the old model reliant on manual review is unsustainable in the AI era. Polosukhin advocates for formal verification, using mathematical proofs to ensure that code behavior is fully consistent with specifications. AI can generate most of the proofs, which are then verified by humans for correctness, drastically reducing proof generation time. He believes formal verification should extend beyond smart contracts to cover critical internet and network software. On the same day, NEAR released an upgrade allowing users to switch to quantum-resistant account keys, while the network can automatically scale capacity as activity grows.