Automated Hacking Dangerous, Warns Electronic Frontier Foundation
On Thursday, a program called Mayhem, created by a Carnegie Mellon team, won the $2 million first prize in the Cyber Grand Challenge, the latest in a series of technology competitions sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA.
Previous DARPA challenges have helped advance the state of the art in self-driving cars and robotics, but this year’s challenge encouraged teams to develop automated hacking software. Mayhem came out on top in an all-automated game of “capture the flag,” in which systems tried to hack each other, while defending themselves from attack—all with no human intervention.
According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, while this is “very cool [and] very innovative,” it “could have been a little dangerous.” While part of the program’s goal is to create automatic systems that detect system vulnerabilities so they can be patched, EFF’s Nate Cardozo, Peter Eckersley, and Jeremy Gillula say that the same technology in the wrong hands could create an epidemic of industrial-scale hacks.
