DARPA announces Self-Patching Software Competition and wining prize is $2 Million

Sometimes throwing money at problems works. As the Pentagon continues to struggle with cybersecurity, their sci-fi-like R&D department, DARPA, is ready to start writing checks. The agency just announced a competition to build a "fully automated cyber defense system." The grand prize? $2 million.

The mad scientist wing of the Pentagon known as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency announced Tuesday that it’s planning to hold a new “Grand Challenge” competition with a $2 million prize. The goal of that seven-figure bakeoff: To build a “fully automated cyber defense system” that protects itself from hackers, responding to attacks and even updating its own code in real-time, without the assistance of humans.

It's establishing the first-ever tournament for automated network defenses, in which systems would compete against each other to test vulnerabilities, make security patches, and generally wage digital war on each other. The aim of its Cyber Grand Challenge is to "vastly improve" the effectiveness and speed of DARPA's own IT security, in what it says are "escalating cyber threats.

“The [Cyber Grand Challenge] seeks to engender a new generation of autonomous cyber defense capabilities that combine the speed and scale of automation with reasoning abilities exceeding those of human experts,” reads the formal request for participant proposals. “In fully autonomous defense, a cyber system capable of reasoning about software will create its own knowledge, autonomously emitting and using knowledge quanta such as vulnerability scanner signatures, intrusion detection signatures, and security patches.”

The notion of a competition like this seems kind of ridiculous at first—a government agency staging a giant capture the flag-style challenge for a seven-figure cash prize. This model has actually been insanely effective in the past, though. The Cyber Grand Challenge is actually modeled after the 2004 competition to build a self-driving car. Though none of the cars even finished the seven-mile course that year, the Stanford team that won the following year went on to build Google's famous robo-car. The very scary but also awesome Atlas robot went through a similar process, too.

In light of those successes, it's not a huge surprise to see the Pentagon outsourcing their cyber defense projects.

Source : Forbes