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What Are the Trade-Offs between Formal Verification and Bug Bounties?

Formal verification offers a mathematical proof of correctness against a defined specification, providing the highest certainty for critical properties, but it is expensive and time-consuming. Bug bounties offer a crowd-sourced, continuous security check where white-hat hackers are incentivized to find and report vulnerabilities in live code.

Bug bounties are cheaper and can find logic flaws that were not covered by the formal specification, but they offer no guarantee that all bugs have been found. The best practice is often to use both.

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