Behind CGC: A DARPA Cyber Grand Challenge White Team Retrospective

DARPA hosted the final event for the Cyber Grand Challenge (CGC) at DEF CON 24 (August 2016), culminating a multi-year effort undertaken by teams spanning academia, industry and government. The goal of the challenge was to create automatic defensive systems capable of reasoning about flaws, formulating patches and deploying the patches on a network in real time. The Challenge was a catalyst for advances in autonomous program analysis, patch synthesis, verification, and much more. Tools and data produced for the CGC continue to aid state of the art advances today. In this talk I'll provide a behind-the-scenes retrospective of DARPA’s CGC: designing challenges with the goal of advancing autonomous program analysis, hardening infrastructure and game mechanics to ensure agreement between game performance and program goals, data-mining the CGC Final Event (CFE) for televised stories, and the lasting impact of the Challenge. The views, opinions, and/or findings expressed are those of the author(s) and should not be interpreted as representing the official views or policies of the Department of Defense or the U.S. Government.