DARPA's Cyber Grand Challenge Heads to DefCon
Typically, a hacking tournament is made up of humans attempting to exploit code and applications, but that's not the case for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Cyber Grand Challenge (CGC). The CGC occurs on Aug. 4 at the DefCon security conference in Las Vegas and will see seven different autonomous computing systems compete in what is being billed as the world's first all-machine hacking tournament.
The goal of the CGC is to promote autonomous computing approaches for the defense of applications and networks. The total prize pool is $3.75 million, with the grand prize winner receiving $2 million, second place getting $1 million and third place winning $750,000.
DefCon has long been home to one of the world's largest Capture the Flag (CTF) hacking team challenges. A CTF is a contest in which participants are rewarded for finding bugs and flaws in a fast-paced environment. With CGC, instead of humans, seven autonomous computer systems will compete against each other in a fully automated way.
