FOSDEM 2026 in Brussels, one of the largest open-source conferences, featured a few presentations on security, including this one from Daniel Stenberg on code security through AI for cURL.
cURL is one of the most widely used command-line tools to download artifacts from the Internet using various protocols. It is open source and composed of around 200,000 lines of C.
A single vulnerability can put the entire Internet infrastructure at risk, placing significant pressure on its maintainers.
Recently, AI has had a significant impact, as more and more security reports have been filed in the hope of earning a bug bounty reward. Most are hallucinations of AI tools.
As a result, the only solution was to remove bounty rewards, because triage was taking too much time. This is a net loss for security.
On the upside, AI security tools like AISLE™ or ZeroPath are now used to discover real issues in code that humans previously missed. This is a plus for the AI revolution.
The race is on, as AI can find bugs in programs that have been used for many years, leaving open the question of how many undisclosed vulnerabilities remain.
This is a scary time for developers, as attackers also have access to these AIs.
We believe Formal Verification will be big this year, as it can definitely show the _absence_ of whole classes of vulnerabilities with 100% success rate.
Traditionally expensive, formal methods are becoming increasingly accessible thanks to AI. You can look in particular at theorem provers such as Rocq or Lean, which are very expressive and can be generated by LLMs with some success. We believe this is the path to verify large-scale C code.
This talk motivates us to continue developing more advanced formal methods at Formal Land 🌲, with the hope of formally verifying a landmark open-source project by the end of 2026!
This sounds like an attainable goal more than ever, and it would put an end to the ever ending cycle of software breaches.
The link to the talk 👇