Behind the Scenes Building DARPA's Cyber Grand Challenge

No ratings

Presented at Bsidescanberra 2017 by

Chris Eagle

DARPA hosted the Cyber Grand Challenge Final Event—the world’s first all-machine cyber hacking tournament—on August 4, 2016 in Las Vegas. Starting with over 100 teams consisting of some of the top security researchers and hackers in the world, DARPA pit seven teams against each other during the final event. During the competition, each team’s Cyber Reasoning System (CRS) automatically identified software flaws, and scanned a purpose-built, air-gapped network to identify affected hosts. The design of this competition was a three year effort that carefully considered the need to promote DARPA's research objectives while also ensuring the integrity of the competiton. This talk is a behind the scenes look at the creation of that competition. We discuss how the design of the competition was meant to influence the behavior of the competitors as well as security measures, many of which were unknown to the competitors, which were implemented in order to ensure a fair competition.