Kiwi cybersecurity expert says maths a defence against AI superhacking
Kiwi cybersecurity expert says maths a defence against AI superhacking
Publish Date: 2026-06-24 22:43:00
Source Domain: www.rnz.co.nz
A Wellington entrepreneur collaborating on cybersecurity projects in the United States and Europe says mathematics can stymie the advancing powers of AI.
Boyd Multerer, the CEO of Kiwi start-up Kry10, is an advocate of a maths-based cybersecurity approach called ‘formal methods’, which is now being piloted by the US Air Force.
Just this week, the hacking threat posed by frontier AI models sparked a national security alert by the Five Eyes intelligence group, which includes New Zealand.
One defence against that threat is to use other AI to patch software against at ever faster rates – AI versus AI.
Boyd Multerer is CEO of Wellington-based cybersecurity firm Kry10.
Supplied / John Ludeman
But Multerer says new research – including projects with the US Department of Energy (DOE) National Labs and intelligence agencies – shows another way.
“If you’re building a new system and writing a significant amount of code, you are going to be spending a lot of money on the AI versus the AI thing,” he said.
“It doesn’t go away just because you’ve run it once. You have to keep running it as the techniques from the attackers change.
“You haven’t actually proven the vulnerabilities are gone. You’ve only gotten out the ones that you know about now.”
But if you can prove with maths that the vulnerabilities aren’t there in the first place, when the code is developed, you can contain that and corral the costs early, Multerer said.
Cyber security expert discusses Five Eyes statement on AI
Midday Report
‘Urgent’ questions
The promise of formal methods has been confined by their complexity.
That is now changing as agentic AI systems take on increasingly autonomous roles, said a recent Software Engineering Daily podcast with the founder of the formal methods approach, Professor Byron Cook, of Amazon.
“The question of how to define, enforce, and verify what those agents are allowed to do has become urgent,” the podcast said.
Multerer’s Kry10 was founded in New Zealand in 2020 and its shareholding is in…
