The reason why NASA’s Curiosity rover is able to continue roaming Mars years after hitting the surface is that the engineers back at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory spent an obscene amount of time testing its components ahead of the launch. They employed a methodology known as formal verification to mathematically confirm the craft doesn’t from any technical issues that might hinder its performance in the harsh conditions of the red planet. Now, a startup called Veriflow Inc. is applying the same approach in the data center to help organizations make their networks just as resilient against outages and security breaches.

The history of the outfit’s newly unveiled software traces back six years to the University of Illinois, where its three co-founders developed a way to translate the complex characteristics of routers and switches into a logical form that can be analyzed at high speed. Their breakthrough enables the Veriflow Verification Engine to simulate every single possible state of a network all the way down to the individual packets that are traversing the data plane. Whenever an administrator adds a new device or tweaks a configuration setting, built-in algorithms automatically adjust the formula to account for the change.

The result is a true-to-life model of an organization’s network that can be tested to see whether reliability requirements are fully met. Veriflow’s software raises the alarms even if it finds a single theoretical scenario where security or uptime might be compromised, which arms users with the necessary knowledge to bullet-proof their infrastructure against unexpected technical issues. That’s an appealing prospect for government agencies and other organizations that have a lot to lose is a hacker somehow manages to find a crack in their defenses.

Veriflow’s technology has even managed to catch the attention of the U.S. Department of Defense, which contributed to a $2.9 million funding round into the startup that was announced against the backdrop of its product launch. The investment also saw the participation of the National Science Foundation and private equity heavyweight New Enterprise Associates. The capital will enable the outfit to accelerate the adoption of its software, which is already starting to find use in the public sector and the Fortune 500.

Veriflow’s early success in applying formal verification to corporate networks could potentially pave the way for other startups looking to address the enterprise’s heightened standards of reliability. The approach is starting to show particular promise in the data management space, where a team MIT researchers unveiled a “mathematically perfect” file system late last year that is described as completely resistant to outages. If it picks up enough momentum, the trend could potentially revolutionize quality assurance across the entire technology stack.

Image via NASA