Cyber

What if computers had a “check engine” light that could indicate new, novel security problems? What if computers could go one step further and heal security problems before they happen?

Computer security experts from academia, industry and the larger security community have organized themselves into more than 30 teams to compete in DARPA’s Cyber Grand Challenge—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. DARPA also announced today that it has reached an agreement to hold the 2016 Cyber Grand Challenge final competition in conjunction with DEF CON, one of the largest computer security conferences in the world.

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.

Capping an intensive three-year push to spark a revolution in automated cyber defense, DARPA today announced that a computer system designed by a team of Pittsburgh-based researchers is the presumptive winner of the Agency’s Cyber Grand Challenge (CGC), the world’s first all-hacking tournament.

DARPA officials this morning released partial final, audited results of yesterday’s all-day Cyber Grand Challenge (CGC) Final Event—the world’s first all-machine cyber hacking tournament—and confirmed that the top-scoring machine was Mayhem, developed by team ForAllSecure of Pittsburgh.