Cyber Grand Challenge

Overview
DARPA created the Cyber Grand Challenge (CGC) as a competition to create automatic defensive systems capable of reasoning about flaws, formulating patches and deploying them on a network in real time. By acting at machine speed and scale, these technologies may someday overturn today's attacker-dominated status quo. Realizing this vision requires breakthrough approaches in a variety of disciplines, including applied computer security, program analysis, and data visualization. Anticipated future benefits include:


 * Expert-level software security analysis and remediation, at machine speeds on enterprise scales
 * Establishment of a lasting R&D community for automated cyber defense
 * Creation of a public, high-fidelity recording of real-time competition between automated cyber defense systems.

DARPA hosted the Cyber Grand Challenge Final Event &mdash; the world's first all-machine cyber hacking tournament &mdash; on August 4, 2016 in Las Vegas.

CGC was the first head-to-head competition between some of the most sophisticated automated bug-hunting systems ever developed. These machines played the classic cybersecurity exercise of Capture the Flag in a specially created computer testbed laden with an array of bugs hidden inside custom, never-before-analyzed software. The machines were e challenged to find and patch within seconds &mdash; not the usual months &mdash; flawed code that was vulnerable to being hacked, and find their opponents' weaknesses before they could defend against them.