Program Mayhem wins world's first all-machine hacking tournament

A computer system named Mayhem has won the world's first all-machine hacking tournament, according to official results released Friday.

In a 10-hour final event of Cyber Grand Challenge (CGC), Mayhem won the contest after holding the lead for most of the tournament which tests computer system's ability to find and fix bugs.

Its designer is ForAllSecure, a Pittsburgh-based team with U.S. university roots for more than a decade.

"We look at this as the first step," David Brumley, the team leader and a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, said.

U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) sets up the competition. Preliminary events have culled competitors down to the seven teams and the DARPA's long-planned competition came to an end on Thursday night at DEF CON, one of the world's largest annual hacking conferences.

"We are at the beginning of a new era and I am pretty excited," Jeff Moss, founder of the DEF CON and a member of the U.S. Homeland Security Advisory Council, told Xinhua.

Fifteen supercomputers (server racks) from seven teams with blinking LEDs were on stage in Paris Las Vegas casino ballroom. The machines developed by ethical computer hackers, academics and private-sector computer security experts were competing to identify, diagnose and fix software flaws in front of thousands computer security experts and other viewers.

The engagement of autonomous systems in such a tournament aims to revolutionize software vulnerability detection and patching, DARPA said.

The process of finding and countering bugs, hacks and other cyber infection vectors is still effectively artisanal. With the growth of the Internet of Things (IoT), cyber security needs to evolve to a largely automated, scalable process, it added.

"I'm enormously gratified that we achieved CGC'S primary goal, which was to provide clear proof of principle that machine-speed, scalable cyber defense is indeed possible," said Mike Walker, the DARPA program manager who launched the challenge in 2013.

The winning system is invited to compete against the world's best human hackers in DEF CON's annual "Capture the Flag" (CTF) competition.

This is the "first-ever inclusion of a mechanical contestant in that event, and could presage the day when ... a computer proves to be the grand master of cyber defense," the research wing of the U.S. military said in a statement.

"I am glad the U.S. government did this and the information is going to help all the companies and everybody in the world," Moss said.

The first DARPA Grand Challenge was a driverless car competition held in 2004. While it was initially a failure with none of the robot vehicles finishing the route, the competition inspired many other companies including Google to build autonomous cars. Now DARPA wants to do the same for cyber security.

"Challenges work not because of the many who can imagine, but because of the few who dare," Walker said. Endit