Such services contain bugs, so what each player must do is identify the bugs, fix them or mitigate them, and at the same time exploit them to gain access to the boxes of the other players.
So basically the programs in the competition do
* vulnerability identification
* vulnerability mitigation
* identification of the best target to attack (presumably based on the first thing, not sure if other things factor in)
David Brumley, PI of the research, went on to found ForAllSecure which is the company covered in the article.
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.
[1] https://twitter.com/joey_rideout/status/761710072237961216?s...
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.
Includes a link to the github for the challenge framework.
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?
However (and impressively), it did patch at least one bug in a task (LEGIT_00007) before any other human team did.
what? This was special olympics of CTF. All AI teams played at the same, terribad level, score differences were minimal.
