Welcome to Quantum Magazine's podcast.

Each episode, we bring you stories about developments in science and mathematics.

I'm Susan Vallett.

If you're a human in the 21st century, it's almost certain you've received an email at some point telling you that your data was compromised in some sort of internet hack.

Even the biggest companies have fallen prey.

So programmers are turning to mathematics to try to shore up vulnerabilities.

They're hoping to use math to eliminate coding bugs that can spill digital secrets.

Now, a set of computer scientists has taken a major step toward that goal.

Last spring, computer scientists released what's known as Evercript, a set of digital

cryptography tools. The researchers were able to prove, in the sense that you can prove the

Pythagorean theorem, that their approach to online security is completely invulnerable to the

main types of hacking attacks that have failed other programs.

Kartik Bargavan is a computer scientist at Inria, the French National Institute for Computer

Science in Paris. He worked on Evercript.

When we say proof, they mean that they prove that our code doesn't have these kinds of attacks.

Evercript wasn't written the way most code is written.

Ordinarily, a team of programmers create software that they hope will satisfy

certain objectives.

Once they finish, they test the code.

If it accomplishes the objectives without showing any unwanted behavior, the programmers

conclude that the software does what it's supposed

to do. But coding errors often show up only in extreme corner cases, a perfect storm of unlikely

...