Ontology Partners with CertiK to Build Reliable Blockchain Security

The Ontology Team
OntologyNetwork
Published in
3 min readJul 17, 2018

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Today Ontology, a new high-performance public multi-chain project and a distributed trust collaboration platform, announced its cooperation with CertiK, a well-known American formal verification company. Both parties will work together in formal verification and enhance the security and reliability of smart contract and blockchain systems.

What is formal verification? GU Ronghui, CertiK Co-Founder and Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University, explained: “Using logical language to describe standards and using strict mathematical deduction to examine whether the given system meets requirements”. CertiK adopts deep specification technology to transform sophisticated smart contracts into modularized mathematical models and verify them through logical deduction to prove the security of smart contracts.

At the present, smart contracts have some security issues: First, due to its irreversibility, once it is released onto the blockchain, its source code cannot be changed. Second, the code of most blockchain projects is open-source, so it is impossible for security vulnerabilities to hide. Third, traditional software security technology, such as testing and real time monitoring, cannot meet the extremely high security requirements of blockchain.

The strategic cooperation of Ontology and CertiK will timely detect security vulnerabilities of open-source code through deep specification technology and ensure the security and reliability of smart contracts before their release. Automatic formal verification can avoid the limitations of human detection, minimize the cost of smart contract verification, making it low cost while having high security.

CertiK is a team of elites from Yale University, Columbia University, and Silicon Valley. Its engineers are from Google, Facebook, Freewheel, and other well-known enterprises. SHAO Zhong, CertiK’s Co-Founder is a lifetime professor and Chair of Computer Science at Yale University. Another Co-Founder, GU Ronghui is an assistant professor at Columbia University.

Speaking on CertiK’s partnership with Ontology, CertiK’s Principal GU Ronghui said:

“Trust and security are the most important consensus of the blockchain industry and the common cause for Ontology and CertiK. It is our honor to work with a forward-looking project like Ontology to build a secure and reliable blockchain ecosystem and ensure the security of the blockchain world”.

Founder of Ontology LI Jun said:

“CertiK’s vision is to realize a transparent, fair, and secure blockchain ecosystem around the world, the same vision as Ontology’s. We look forward to work with CertiK and bring more real cases of smart contract formal verification, solve blockchain security pain points, and create an ecosystem with high security”.

About CertiK

CertiK is a blockchain and smart contract verification platform founded by top formal verification experts from Yale and Columbia University and former senior software engineers from Google and Facebook. Different from the traditional testing approaches, CertiK attempts to mathematically prove blockchain ecosystem and smart contracts are hacker-resistant and bug-free. CertiK’s key features include a layer-based decomposition approach, pluggable proof engine, machine-checkable proof objects, certified dApp libraries, and smart labelling.

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