Why There is no General Solution to the Problem of Software Verification

How can we be certain that software is reliable? Is there any method that can verify the correctness of software for all cases of interest? Computer scientists and software engineers have informally assumed that there is no fully general solution to the verification problem. In this paper, we survey approaches to the problem of software verification and offer a new proof for why there can be no general solution.The National Security Agency through the Science of Security initiative contract #H98230-18-D-0009