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DARPA’s Cyber Grand Challenge (2014–2016)

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Abstract

On June 3, 2014, DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) kicked off the first-ever Cyber Grand Challenge. The Cyber Grand Challenge is simple: we’ve challenged the world to build high-performance computers that can play Capture the Flag (CTF), a computer security competition format pioneered and refined by the hacker community over the past two decades.

The networked civilization we are building is going to need to be able to make strong promises about the safety of software, because it won’t just be guarding our data security — it will be guarding our physical security.

— Mike Walker, DARPA Project Manager (June 3, 2014)

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The computer hardware in CTF must fit entirely in a single, standard 19″ 42U rack [24].

  2. 2.

    Figure 16.1 is the Cyber Grand Challenge infrastructure team at the DARPA office building on June 3, 2014. Chris Eagle wrote on reddit: “The photo is our AMA ‘proof’. Many of us brought totems from our former work. The sheep is the mascot of DDTEK, past organizers of DEFCON CTF. The books on her lap are the Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR) and Defense Federal Acquisitions Supplement (DFARS) (which may be relevant to one of the challenge binaries). The other paper is the front page of the science section of today’s New York Times.”

  3. 3.

    KLEE is a symbolic virtual machine built on top of the LLVM compiler infrastructure, which uses a theorem prover to try to evaluate all dynamic paths through a program in an effort to find bugs and to prove properties of functions. A major feature of KLEE is that it can produce a test case in the event that it detects a bug [26].

  4. 4.

    S2E is a platform for analyzing the properties and behavior of software systems. S2E has been used to develop practical tools for comprehensive performance profiling, reverse engineering of proprietary software, and bug finding for both kernel-mode and user-mode binaries [27].

  5. 5.

    DECREE  = DARPA Experimental Cyber Research Evaluation Environment . DECREE is an open-source extension built atop the Linux operating system. Constructed from the ground up as a platform for operating small, isolated software test samples that are incompatible with any other software in the world—DECREE aims to provide a safe research and experimentation environment for the Cyber Grand Challenge [24].

  6. 6.

    Matt Blaze, Associate Professor of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania, is a researcher in the areas of secure systems, cryptography, and trust management (a term that he coined) [28].

  7. 7.

    In computer security, the “weird machine” is a computational artifact where additional code execution can happen outside the original specification of the program.

  8. 8.

    From Rolf Rolles’ LinkedIn profile [23]: Seventeen years of reverse engineering: malware, interoperability, security assessment (including patch diffing), copy protections, exploit development. First researcher to publicly break virtualization obfuscators (older versions of VMProtect; current versions of TheMida CISC VM). Non-trivial C/C++/OCaml reversing tool development, including techniques from compiler theory, program analysis, and formal verification. Was the lead developer of BinDiff in ancient times.

  9. 9.

    From Halvar Flake’s LinkedIn profile [25]: Staff Engineer at Google, Zürich Area, Switzerland. I like to work on challenging problems related to computer security; ideally with a heavy algorithmic / mathematical bent. Technical work: - Reverse engineering of malicious software - Reverse engineering of COTS software - Security analysis of software, vulnerability/exploit development - Engineering of large distributed systems - Large-scale analysis of executable code (large both in terms of volume and individual size) - Static analysis, formal methods - Applying mathematics / statistical inference / “machine learning” to real-world problems.

  10. 10.

    In the paper “Abstract Satisfaction”, Vijay D’Silva, Leopold Haller, and Daniel Kroening introduced a framework for applying abstract interpretation to problems that are NP-hard but decidable, such as satisfiability [29].

  11. 11.

    See, for example, “An Immunological Model of Distributed Detection and Its Application to Computer Security” by Steven Andrew Hofmeyr [30].

  12. 12.

    Figure 16.2.

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Lee, N. (2015). DARPA’s Cyber Grand Challenge (2014–2016). In: Counterterrorism and Cybersecurity. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17244-6_16

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17244-6_16

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