Your CISO Doesn't Want More Findings. They Want Proof.

Your security operations team scans your AWS environment and discovers 47 problems. When executives hear this, they perceive it as a list of issues that need fixing. However, a finance company learned from their experience that bug-finding tools only generate bad news. To provide assurance, they needed proofs instead of just finding bugs.

Amazon collaborated with a bank that could not manually reason about their IAM policies due to their complexity. Amazon formalized the semantics of the policy language and demonstrated mathematically what the policies allowed and disallowed. This helped the bank increase their workload and spending, as they gained confidence in their policies.

There are two types of information security tools: bug finders and property provers. Bug finders list the issues found in your environment, while property provers verify that no unauthorized principal can access sensitive resources. Executives want assurance, not just a list of problems. They want to confidently tell their board, auditors, and regulators that certain properties hold true across their entire environment.

AWS recognized this and developed tools to provide proofs. Property proving provides deterministic and reproducible evidence, which is valuable to CISOs and auditors. Running the same proof again yields the same result, giving the CISO confidence. Proofs enable fearless infrastructure rewrites and compound across services, providing global benefits.

The adoption of formal verification within Amazon started with pitching the idea to teams, who initially showed no interest. However, once adopted, proofs became a crucial part of their business strategy, enabling them to rewrite infrastructure confidently and cost-effectively.