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Comment by engineeringwoke | Hacker News Reader

You can't formally verify anything that uses consensus, which is the backbone of the entire web. It's a complete non-starter.

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Care to elaborate? Perhaps the tools to do this in practice aren't there (which just shows how young the field of software "engineering" really is), but what consensus are you talking about and how is it an obstacle to verifying code? Most of the web follows standards and protocols, which actually sort of a prerequisite for communications across different systems...

Basically the modern web uses orchestration, for pretty much everything. Usually Kubernetes is doing that. Theoretically protocols like RAFT are formally verifiable, but their implementations in orchestration tools like etcd have not been, and I would go so far as to say that that is an impossible task. Therefore, the entire exercise is kind of silly.

Thanks, interesting. However, that just seems like a protocol like any other, with no real reason why you "can't" formally verify it. Is there something special about a consensus algorithm / protocol that makes it any more difficult to verify than any other algorithm which doesn't yet have a formally verified implementation?

Edit: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-48989-6_...

That would be like saying that you can verify the software that CERN uses to measure the Higgs Boson because we verified general relativity.

> You can't formally verify anything that uses consensus

What did you mean by this then? There certainly seems to be nothing special about consensus that makes it any harder to verify than anything else. It's not fundamentally impossible to verify the software that CERN uses, it just takes some work.

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