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How to Solve Secure Program Synthesis — LessWrong

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Secure program synthesis (SPS) is the problem of automatically generating, or “synthesizing”, software which is known to be secure. In practice, this manifests as the triple-task of synthesizing some software S, a specification φ saying what it would mean for S to be “secure”, and a proof P that S satisfies φ. Depending on your formalism, you might write something impressive-looking like: P ⊢ ( S ⊨ φ ) … meaning that P proves (⊢) that S satisfies (or “models”, ⊨) the security specification φ. The word “secure” here is an informal descriptor of the kinds of qualities enforced by φ, which could be things like, “the program S is not subject to IDOR or SQL injection attacks” or “the smart-contract S does not allow double-spending”, or whatever.[1] That is to say, security is a social construct -- there is no mathematical way to define “secure” versus “insecure” without first presuming to know which functions of a given program are desirable versus undesirable to the user.[2] Note that ton

x How to Solve Secure Program Synthesis — LessWrong AI Control AI Frontpage 24 How to Solve Secure Program Synthesis by Max von Hippel , Simon Henniger , miyazono , Quinn 30th Mar 2026 13 min read 0 24 Introduction Secure program synthesis (SPS) is the problem of automatically generating, or “synthesizing”, software which is known to be secure. In practice, this manifests as the triple-task of synthesizing some software S, a specification φ saying what it would mean for S to be “secure”, and a proof P that S satisfies φ. Depending on your formalism, you might write something impressive-looking

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