NEAR co-founder: The speed of AI-assisted hacking attacks is now exceeding traditional code review

PANews July 21, according to The Block, NEAR Protocol co-founder Illia Polosukhin said that AI is greatly accelerating hackers’ ability to discover software vulnerabilities, and traditional code review approaches can no longer cope. He noted that the Balancer incident in October last year marked the beginning of AI-assisted hacker attacks, and the old model relying on manual review is no longer sustainable in the AI era.

Polosukhin argued for using formal verification, by using mathematics to prove that code behavior fully matches specifications. He said AI can generate most of the proofs, which humans then verify for correctness, significantly shortening the proof generation time. He believes formal verification should be extended beyond smart contracts to cover critical internet and network software. On the same day, NEAR released an upgrade: users can switch to post-quantum account keys, and the network can automatically expand capacity as activity grows.