
Carnegie Mellon’s Mayhem AI Wins DARPA’s Cyber Grand Challenge - ebakan
https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/05/carnegie-mellons-mayhem-ai-takes-home-2-million-from-darpas-cyber-grand-challenge/
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jmgrosen
Hey guys, member of the (currently unverified) third place team, Shellphish.
If anyone has any questions, I (or another member of my team) would be glad to
answer them. We'll also be giving a talk at DEF CON on Sunday after the CTF
ends, where we'll be open sourcing our CRS!

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crypto5
What kind of AI was involved in your and competitors systems?

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jmgrosen
If you mean AI in the sense of neural networks, Bayesian inference, etc.,
absolutely none in our CRS :) In retrospect, we could have made some better
decisions about when to patch by using some of the simpler "AI" methods, but
in terms of the actual core exploiting and defending, there's not much
research into using AI in security.

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yayitscaroline
It's funny that Brumley's first-place-winning robot CTF team is going to be
competing against his first-place-winning human CTF team at DEFCON.

The DARPA team is headed up by professor David Brumley. He also leads the
Carnegie Mellon CTF hacker group PPP (Plaid Parliament of Pwning) that often
wins at DEFCON's CTFs. This article mentioned that the Mayhem robot is going
to be battling the human CTF players at DEFCON. I wonder who he'll be rooting
for.

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cschmidt
As of this afternoon when I walked by Mayhem was in last place, and PPP was in
second place

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joeyrideout
I just came from a full day of talks at DEF CON, and a highlight for me was
how the CGC servers were all lit up on stage behind the speakers of one room
of the con [1]. It was incredibly stylish and impressive.

[1]
[https://twitter.com/joey_rideout/status/761710072237961216?s...](https://twitter.com/joey_rideout/status/761710072237961216?s=09)

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pingec
Video here:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xek4OcScCh4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xek4OcScCh4)

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deckar01
This was a really amazing competition. Imagine running symbolic analysis and
fuzzing like integration tests as part of a deploy process, then having fixes
proposed algorithmically when a vulnerability is discovered.

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Eclyps
I thought that the production of the competition was extraordinary. Seeing
everything lit up on stage was straight out of a movie (in a good way). I
thought that the event itself at Defcon was super weird, though. A lot of
people, myself included, assumed that the event was going to be more real-
time. In reality, the servers had been competing for hours already.

That being said, huge props to these amazing teams. It was so fascinating to
see how each system reacted to the same situations and then either hunkered
down to protect itself or go on the offensive. Really amazing stuff.

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xtacy
I tried browsing the Darpa challenge's website to know more, but I couldn't
find any information. Could someone please post a link to a detailed
description of the challenge?

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cschmidt
It is basically computers playing Capture the Flag (CTF) against each other.
They are given binary programs with security flaws. They need to identify the
flaws automatically and develop a patch for their own system. At the same they
go out to crash the other teams. Normally humans do this, but the darpa
challenge was to have computer systems do it autonomously.

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ChuckMcM
I'm really surprised they didn't call it Black Ice :-)

That is a pretty amazing result all in all. So at what point do we combine it
with DeepMind and have something that owns the Internet?

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brian_herman
The Mayhem is also competing in the CTF.

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q3k
It's not doing that hot - currently last place, but not very far back in terms
of points.

However (and impressively), it did patch at least one bug in a task
(LEGIT_00007) before any other human team did.

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mkagenius
I am very impressed by the visualisations - super computers churning data for
visualisations!

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rasz_pl
>Not the nicest thing to say about a champion AI that just took first place in
an incredibly sophisticated virtual game

what? This was special olympics of CTF. All AI teams played at the same,
terribad level, score differences were minimal.

