Microsoft To Create a Smart Contract Security Task Group

Smart Contracts is one of the popular concepts associated with Blockchain Technology and Cryptocurrencies, however, recent events like The DAO contract breach highlighted the importance of designing and writing secure code. 

The ability to program money and to create self-enforcing contracts unlock the potential to create incredible applications that may shape the way we deal with our money. Smart Contracts are pieces of code that are intended to execute in a certain fashion, but The DAO hack re-stated the importance of building secure code.

Kinakuta is the name that Microsoft gave to a brand new team of researchers from the ‘blockchain space’. Marley Gray, Microsoft’s director of business development and strategy, said to Coindesk:

We feel there’s a huge opportunity here to involve the community. Kinakuta is the community building around Microsoft best practices and elsewhere, to collect best practices and tools and involve developers in creating these best practices.

According to the reports, Gray drafted a list of 35 programmers and organizations that Microsoft wants to invite. The list includes active members of the Ethereum Foundation, banking consortium R3CEV, among others.

Andrew Keys, a member of ConsenSys also worked alongside Gray to draft list of potential members, Keys is in charge of strategic technological partnerships, business development, and communications for ConsenSys.

After the infamous DAO Hack, the Ethereum foundation, as well as the developer community, are actively seeking ways to bring Formal Verification –the process of validating the behavior of computer programs– to decentralized applications built on Ethereum’s programming language, Solidity.

Microsoft made a significant contribution by releasing a whitepaper titled ‘Formal Verification of Smart Contracts’ made by Harvard researchers and Microsoft employees. Such discoveries aren’t limited to Ethereum’s Smart Contracts, but to all platforms, present or future.

Christian Reitwiessner also announced that the developer Yoichi Hirai will be joining the Ethereum Foundation as a formal verification engineer. Reitwiessner said:

Having a person dedicated to formal methods not only gives us the ability to move faster in this important but also fruitful area, it hopefully also allows us to communicate better with academia in order to connect the various singular projects that have appeared in the past weeks.