Geeks win millions for teaching computers to battle each other

The seven teams competed for almost $4 million in prizes in Wednesday’s competition, which was sponsored by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and performed in front of 5,000 computer security professionals and others in Las Vegas.

The competition was the brainchild of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and was setup up by the agency in the hope of encouraging more interest in the design and creation of autonomous security systems.

Mayhem’s creators are now in line to receive a $2 million prize to continue their work and make their software program more effective and to also make it ready for the ‘real world’.

“Mayhem” was provisionally named victor of the competition.

Mechanical Phish, a system designed by team Shellphish from the University of California, Santa Barbara, was the third-place victor and will take home $750,000.

Mayhem will compete with teams of humans in the Def Con capture the flag contest, which starts on Friday.

Mike Walker, DARPA program manager who launched the challenge in 2013, says “I’m enormously gratified that we achieved CGC’s primary goal, which was to provide clear proof of principle that machine-speed, scalable cyberdefense is indeed possible”.

“I’m confident it will speed the day when networked attackers no longer have the inherent advantage they enjoy today”, Walker said.

Seven teams comprised of white-hat hackers, academics and private-sector experts competed in the challenge, where automated systems worked to detect and patch flawed code and discover opponents’ vulnerabilities.

The Pittsburgh-based team known as ForAllSecure, designer of the computer system Mayhem, is announced victor of the Cyber Grand Challenge (CGC), in Las Vegas, United States, on August 5, 2016. “That’s the right approach for automated vulnerability detection, too”.

The process of finding and countering bugs, hacks and other cyber infection vectors is still effectively artisanal. And the good news is that the computers did a great job and proved that it can detect a vulnerability in a month, week or even days while it takes nearly a year by the human researchers to find flaws in software.

In a blog post ahead of the final, he explained that the competition gives researchers a chance to compare, contrast, and work out the best ways systems could automatically fix themselves. It is the first time a computer has competed.

The award was given on August 5 during the Def Con conference held at the Paris Hotel in Las Vegas.

The anti hacking competition was held in a Vegas casino ball room at the Def Con hacker conference and has quickly been labelled as the “Cyber Grand Challenge”.

“This may be the end of DARPA’s Cyber Grand Challenge but it’s just the beginning of a revolution in software security”, Walker said. Raytheon said its cyber reasoning system uses autonomous reverse engineering software, continuous machine learning and advanced analytics to ensure the code is “smart” enough to keep up with evolving threats.