Cyber

Seven teams from around the country have earned the right to play in the final competition of DARPA’s Cyber Grand Challenge (CGC), a first-of-its-kind tournament designed to speed the development of automated security systems able to defend against cyberattacks as fast as they are launched. The winners successfully squared off against dozens of other teams for the opportunity to compete head to head next year for nearly $4 million in prizes—and the chance to help revolutionize cybersecurity going forward.

The Heartbleed security bug existed in many of the world’s computer systems for nearly two-and-a-half years before it was discovered and a fix circulated in the spring of 2014, by which time it had rendered an estimated half a million of the internet’s secure servers vulnerable to theft and other mischief. And while Heartbleed was in some respects an outlier, long-lived critical flaws in widely deployed bedrock internet infrastructure are not rare.

On August 4, in Las Vegas, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) will host the world’s first, all-machine hacking tournament. This Cyber Grand Challenge will mark the culmination of an ambitious three-year effort to develop advanced, autonomous systems that can to detect, evaluate, and patch software vulnerabilities before adversaries have a chance to exploit them.

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DARPA will hold the world’s first all-computer Capture the Flag tournament live on stage (co-located with the DEF CON conference in Las Vegas) where automated systems may take the first steps toward a defensible, connected future. Seven teams from across the United States qualified to compete in the Final Event. For more information, please visit: http://www.cybergrandchallenge.com.

Real cyber battles require both offense and defense. The CyberStakes CTF was a team-based full-spectrum, attack/defense Capture the Flag (CTF) competition. Each team was given identical software to defend while simultaneously attacking other teams. Points were awarded for successfully attacking other competitors while simultaneously defending their own infrastructure. This event was in the spirit of the annual DEF CON CTF competition, where most attacks revolve around exploitation and defense of traditional software binaries.