DARPA Declares AI Cyber Problem Finalists

Seven groups superior to the finals after the DARPA AI Cyber Problem (AIxCC) semifinal competitors at DEF CON 32 final week. The groups have been every awarded a $2 million prize and can take part within the ultimate competitors in August 2025.

A partnership between DARPA and the Superior Analysis Initiatives Company for Well being (ARPA-H), the AIxCC competitors had groups design synthetic intelligence (AI) methods to safe open supply infrastructure software program that’s used throughout the personal and public sectors in areas like finance, utilities, and well being care. These methods are susceptible to cyberattacks as a result of they’ve massive assault surfaces and lack safety instruments at scale. Certainly, many have been current targets, highlighting the pressing want to guard vital infrastructure.

For the competitors, groups have been requested to develop cyber reasoning methods that might discover and repair vulnerabilities in a set of “problem initiatives” that have been designed by AIxCC consultants. Practically 40 groups submitted methods. The opponents’ methods found 22 distinctive artificial vulnerabilities and patched 15 of them. The methods discovered 11 distinctive patches for C-based challenges and 4 for Java-based challenges. One real-world bug was present in SQLite3 and has been disclosed.

“In true DARPA trend, we did not know if our speculation could be confirmed after we launched this program. Now we have seen that AI methods are able to not solely figuring out but additionally patching vulnerabilities to safeguard the code that underpins vital infrastructure,” mentioned Andrew Carney, program supervisor for AIxCC, in an announcement.

The next groups will advance to the ultimate:

Groups have one 12 months to develop their methods earlier than subsequent 12 months’s ultimate competitors. AIxCC will distribute $29.5 million in prize cash to the groups judged to create the best methods, and winners should launch their methods as open supply software program after the competitors.