Eagle, Christopher S.

The Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) proposes to design and implement infrastructure in support of the DARPA Cyber Grand Challenge which solicits performers to build an automated system capable of analyzing binary software for vulnerabilities, automatically creating and applying mitigations for each discovered vulnerability (perhaps in the form of a patched binary), and automatically generating proof of concept code capable of proving the existence of flaws in remotely deployed software. Performers will compete for a grand challenge prize by pitting their solutions against one another in a computer network security exercise modeled after the Capture the Flag [1] competition held annually at the Defcon [2] security conference in Las Vegas. In order for the competitors to participate in this event an infrastructure is required that provides a pluggable interface for performers to connect to the competition. During the competition each performer's automaton will attempt to protect test software under its control as well as scan for vulnerabilities in software protected by opposing automatons in order to demonstrate the effectiveness (or lack of effectiveness) of each automatically developed and deployed mitigation technique. The infrastructure supporting this competition must simultaneously allow for unrestricted cyber competition between the competitors while ensuring the integrity of the competition infrastructure itself. Additionally the competition infrastructure must facilitate the collection of sufficient data related to the behavior of each automaton in order to support both real time observation of the progress being made by each automaton as well as to properly measure the outcome of the competition for the purposes of awarding the grand challenge prize.
Computer Science
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
DoD
2017