One year after its launch, the DARPA AI Cyber ​​​​Challenge (AIxCC) has narrowed its field to seven semifinalists.

The competition, unexpectedly announced at Black Hat 2023, pitted teams against each other to build AI models that could better secure the open-source code that underpins many systems used in critical infrastructure. Forty-two of them advanced to the semifinals, which culminated last weekend at DEF CON in Las Vegas, with seven of the teams each winning $2 million in prize money and a spot in next year’s finals.

“In true DARPA style, we didn’t know if our hypothesis would be proven when we launched this program,” Andrew Carney, program manager for AIxCC, said in a statement announcing the finalists. “Now we’ve seen that AI systems can not only identify vulnerabilities, but also patch them to protect the code that underpins critical infrastructure.”

A look at the Challenge Dashboard in the AIxCC Village at DEF CON 32 – Click to enlarge

In total, 22 vulnerabilities were found in the five challenge projects that were set up for the semi-finalists, of which 15 could be patched. The goal for the semi-finalists was to develop a “cyber reasoning system” that could automatically process the challenge projects.

While the vulnerabilities in the challenges were synthetic, the use cases were not: the challenges were designed to test Jenkins, the Linux kernel, Nginx, SQLite3, and Apache Tika, all of which are widely used in systems that are tied to critical infrastructure.

“The competitors’ systems identified 11 unique patches for C-based challenges and four unique patches for Java-based challenges,” DARPA said. “The competitors’ systems also found one real bug in SQLite3, which was responsibly disclosed according to SQLite3’s bug reporting guidelines.”

To win the grand prize, you must use open source

A spot in the finals comes with the aforementioned $2 million cash prize, and there is a total of $29.5 million available for cumulative awards for the project. That said, there is one major caveat for any team that wants to advance to the finals: they must agree to open-source their work.

Teams that agree to open source will have to hand their projects over to the Linux Foundation’s Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF), which will become the custodians of the models, AIxCC technical project manager Jeff Diecks told us at DEF CON. Details of the deals won’t be worked out or announced until next year’s finals, DARPA said. We reached out to the agency for more information.

“If we do this right … we will make the world a better place,” OpenSSF Director Omkhar Arasaratnam told us in an interview with him and Diecks.

No details about the winning teams’ designs were released, but the list of winners was as follows: 42-b3yond-6ug, all_you_need_is_a_fuzzing_brain, Lacrosse, Shellphish, Team Atlanta, Theori, and Trail of Bits were offered $2 million. It is not yet clear if the various teams have accepted the prize yet.

DARPA is joined in funding the project by the Advanced Research Project Agency for Health (ARPA-H), which has committed $20 million of its own funds to the competition. Finalists will compete for a grand prize of $4 million, with second and third place earning $3 million and $1.5 million, respectively. ®