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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.
Whats worse is that the prize money is taxpayer funded.
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 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.
Um, this assumes that one side can always maintain an advantage, amiright? Otherwise it just sounds like a really fast game of cat and mouse.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
The term AI has become synonymous with "something we'll see in 30 years".
AIs can drive cars and pick people out of pictures and even go back through my google photos album and match my 7 yr old with her baby picture (regardless if it does this by inferring that I only have one kid and therefore this is probably it or through facial recognition or some combination of the two, it's a nifty trick.), and beat a world class human at not only Chess but Go. My 13 yr old self, fresh out of reading Neuromancer would have told you we'd need an AI for that.
Now that we've reached there AI has receded into the future.
I saw the presentation last year DC about what they're attempting to accomplish. They want to write code that without human assistance can analyze a binary, (a neat trick by itself with the halting problem) for weaknesses, develop a patch for them, and at the same time attack its opponents and circumvent their fixes.
The real trick will be tho, the winner from the AI contest goes against the human's at Defcon on CTF. The money is heavily against the AI, but even if it places a good showing, it'll
The other issue is that people mistakenly assume that AI means Human-Level intellect (and usually greater-then human, since most of us couldn't beat a wold class Go player.
It's also separate from consciousness.
A computer that's as smart as a barn owl is artificially intelligent (and would probably be a scary good drone pilot).
Min
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
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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