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A blueprint for formal verification of Apple corecrypto

Written by Apple Security Engineering and Architecture (SEAR) and Hardware Technologies Formal Verification

The introduction of quantum-secure cryptography in iMessage marked the start of a significant security transition to protect Apple users from threats posed by future quantum computers. Deploying this new generation of algorithms at scale across all Apple platforms requires high assurance, so we developed rigorous new formal verification methods to prove the mathematical correctness of our implementation. With this week’s release of corecrypto, we’re publishing our implementations of quantum-secure ML-KEM and ML-DSA algorithms — along with the mathematical proofs we built to assure they are faithful to the FIPS 203 and FIPS 204 specifications — for independent evaluation by experts. And to further advance the state of the art for assuring critical software, we're also publishing the formal verification libraries and tools that we created to achieve the strongest known correctness results for any widely-deployed production implementation of the relevant algorithms.