CybersecurityTeams chosen for the 2016 DARPA Cyber Grand Challenge final competition
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 CGC winners will be handsomely rewarded, but DARPA says that more important than the prize money is the fact that it ignites the cybersecurity community’s belief that automated cybersecurity analysis and remediation are finally within reach.
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.
Computers are important for detecting known network vulnerabilities and the swarms of malicious programs that are constantly seeking to take advantage of those weaknesses, but cyber defense today still ultimately depends on experts to patch those weaknesses and stymie new attacks — a process that can take months or longer, by which time critical systems may have been breached.
DARPA notes that CGC aims to automate the cyber defense process to identify weaknesses instantly and counter attacks in real time.
Out of 104 teams that had originally registered in 2014, twenty-eight teams made it through two DARPA-sponsored dry runs and into last month’s CGC Qualifying Event. In that contest, teams tested the high-performance computers they had built and programmed to play a round of “capture the flag” (CTF) — a game that experts use to test their cyber defense skills. CTF games require competitors to reverse engineer software created by contest organizers and locate and heal its hidden weaknesses in networked competition. The CGC final event will take place in Las Vegas in August 2016, in conjunction with DEF CON, home of the longest-running annual CTF competition for experts.
“After two years of asking ‘What if?’ and challenging teams around the world with a very difficult series of preliminary events, we’ve shown that there is a place for computers in an adversarial contest of the mind that until now has belonged solely to human experts,” said Mike Walker, DARPA program manager. “As we had hoped when we launched this competition, the winning teams reflect a broad array of communities — academic pioneers of the field, security industry powerhouses, and veterans of the CTF circuit, each of which brings to CGC its own strengths.”
Each team designed an innovative system that achieves, to varying degrees, the difficult task of finding and fixing software safety problems in the kind of code used everywhere every day. “The results bode well for an exciting competition next year
