The Cyber Grand Challenge and the Future of Cyber-Autonomy

The Cyber Grand Challenge was about much more than a capture-theflag (CTF) competition between computers. The people who built those systems had to learn how to replicate the behavior of human hackers, perform binary program analysis, patch vulnerable applications— or not, if installing the patch hurt performance or resulted in a functional regression. In this article, based on my 2018 Enigma talk, I will describe the competition, and also how human hackers and the CGC competitors’ systems have different strengths.