The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health recently released a procedures and scoring guide for the final competition of the AI Cyber Challenge (AIxCC), which will award $8.5 million in prizes.
The AI Cyber Challenge final competition kicks off this spring and ends in August. Seven finalist teams, composed of academia and industry experts, are designing novel cyber reasoning systems that incorporate large language models to automatically find and patch vulnerabilities in open source software. Competitors will be scored based on the ability to find and fix vulnerabilities as well as analyze bug reports.
“Cyber threats to critical infrastructure are broad and unrelenting,” Andrew Carney, AI Cyber Challenge program manager, said.
The final competition will take place over a series of four rounds. In each round, each team’s cyber reasoning system will have limited time to find and patch vulnerabilities in software challenges based on real-world software that is critical to industry, national security, and the public.
“We’re looking for breakthrough systems that can give software defenders an edge when it comes to outpacing adversaries,” Carney said. “We saw from the AIxCC Semifinal Competition last year that AI systems can develop and deploy patches for software vulnerabilities in minutes and at a fraction of the cost of existing methods. Now, we’re raising the bar and putting the top systems to the test against a broader and more complex range of challenges, with the goal of developing systems that the public and private sectors can use immediately to secure critical code.”