LAS VEGAS, Nev. — Mayhem ruled the day when seven AIs clashed here last week — a bot named Mayhem that, along with its competitors, proved that machines can now quickly find many types of security vulnerabilities hiding in vast amounts of code.
Sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, the first-of-its-kind contest sought to explore how artificial intelligence and automation might help find security and design flaws that bad actors use to penetrate computer networks and steal data.
Mayhem, built by the For All Secure team out of Carnegie Mellon University, so outclassed its competition that it won even though it was inoperable for about half of the contest’s 96 270-second rounds. Mayhem pivoted between two autonomous methods of finding bugs and developing ways to exploit them.