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DARPA Will Stage an AI Fight in Las Vegas For DEF CON (yahoo.com)
An anonymous Slashdot reader writes: "A bunch of computers will try to hack each other in Vegas for a $2 million prize," reports Tech Insider calling it a "historic battle" that will coincide with "two of the biggest hacking conferences, Blackhat USA and DEFCON". DARPA will supply seven teams with a supercomputer. Their challenge? Create an autonomous A.I. system that can "hunt for security vulnerabilities that hackers can exploit to attack a computer, create a fix that patches that vulnerability and distribute that patch -- all without any human interference."
"The idea here is to start a technology revolution," said Mike Walker, DARPA's manager for the Cyber Grand Challenge contest. Yahoo Tech notes that it takes an average of 312 days before security vulnerabilities are discovered -- and 24 days to patch it. "if all goes well, the CGC could mean a future where you don't have to worry about viruses or hackers attacking your computer, smartphone or your other connected devices. At a national level, this technology could help prevent large-scale attacks against things like power plants, water supplies and air-traffic infrastructure.
It's being billed as "the world's first all-machine hacking tournament," with a prize of $2 million for the winner, while the second and third place tem will win $1 million and $750,000.
"The idea here is to start a technology revolution," said Mike Walker, DARPA's manager for the Cyber Grand Challenge contest. Yahoo Tech notes that it takes an average of 312 days before security vulnerabilities are discovered -- and 24 days to patch it. "if all goes well, the CGC could mean a future where you don't have to worry about viruses or hackers attacking your computer, smartphone or your other connected devices. At a national level, this technology could help prevent large-scale attacks against things like power plants, water supplies and air-traffic infrastructure.
It's being billed as "the world's first all-machine hacking tournament," with a prize of $2 million for the winner, while the second and third place tem will win $1 million and $750,000.
Bot's have been battling like this for many years. A decade ago I was taking agents and using them to create self healing networks when I traveled as a consultant. I picked up and used a number of tricks used by botnet operators. I took the logic used to keep a botnet up and running and used that on corporate networks.
I automated the works, and did so with nothing more than a set of scripts and set of agents. You could well argue the result was black hat botnets battling corp botnets. I have got to imagine that I was far from the first to build something like this. Without doubt blackhat botnets have battled blackhat botnets for control for many years.
Where's the innovation, using a supercomputer?
the prize might as well be a lollipop of your favorite flavor because a program that can find and create vulnerabilities like they want are effectively money printing machines. you would be better of setting up an online store and hocking off exploits indefinitely.
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