The Future of Cyber-Autonomy

Wednesday, January 17, 2018 - 1:00 pm1:30 pm

David Brumley, CEO, ForAllSecure

Abstract: 

We need to move to a fully autonomous world for software security. Current software security attack and defense is done by humans, at human time lines. Cyber-autonomy research and development is creating tech that makes fully autonomous cyber possible. Cyber-autonomy promises to scale better and make defense possible within machine-scale time.

In this talk, I will describe the Cyber Grand Challenge and the system Mayhem. Mayhem is a fully autonomous cyber system that can find new vulnerabilities, generate exploits, and self-heal off-the-shelf software. Mayhem is the result of 10 years of academic research and 3 years of commercial development. Mayhem competed and won a $2 million dollar prize in the US Cyber Grand Challenge competition co-hosted at DEFCON 2016. I will describe how Mayhem works, the Cyber Grand Challenge competition, and how Mayhem fared against the world's best hacking teams. I will also describe how I think Mayhem, and other autonomous systems like it, will change the security landscape in the next decade.

David Brumley, CEO ForAllSecure

David Brumley is the CEO and co-founder of ForAllSecure, a company bent on securing the world's software against exploitable bugs. David is on leave as the Director of CyLab, the Carnegie Mellon Security and Privacy Institute, and a Professor of ECE and CS at CMU. His research interests include all areas of security, with a specialization in software security. Prof. Brumley received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, an M.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University, and a B.A. in Mathematics from the University of Northern Colorado. Brumley's honors include a United States Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) from President Obama, a 2013 Sloan Foundation award and numerous best paper awards. Prof. Brumley is also advisor and a founding member of PPP, one of the world's most elite competitive hacking teams.

BibTeX
@inproceedings {208121,
author = {David Brumley},
title = {The Future of {Cyber-Autonomy}},
booktitle = {Enigma 2018 (Enigma 2018)},
year = {2018},
address = {Santa Clara, CA},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/node/208122},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = jan
}

Presentation Video