Why DARPA is Funding an AI-Powered Bug-Spotting Challenge

Somewhere in America's Defense Department, the DARPA R&D agency is running a two-year contest to write an AI-powered program "that can scan millions of lines of open-source code, identify security flaws and fix them, all without human intervention," reports the Washington Post. [Alternate URL here.] But as they see it, "The contest is one of the clearest signs to date that the government sees flaws in open-source software as one of the country's biggest security risks, and considers artificial intelligence vital to addressing it."Free open-source programs, such as the Linux operating system, help run everything from websites to power stations. The code isn't inherently worse than what's in proprietary programs from companies like Microsoft and Oracle, but there aren't enough skilled engineers tasked with testing it. As a result, poorly maintained free code has been at the root of some of the most expensive cybersecurity breaches of all time, including the 2017 Equifax disaster that exposed the personal information of half of all Americans. The incident, which led to the largest-ever data breach settlement, cost the company more than $1 billion in improvements and penalties. If people can't keep up with all the code being woven into every industrial sector, DARPA hopes machines can. "The goal is having an end-to-end 'cyber reasoning system' that leverages large language models to find vulnerabilities, prove that they are vulnerabilities, and patch them," explained one of the advising professors, Arizona State's Yan Shoshitaishvili.... Some large open-source projects are run by near-Wikipedia-size armies of volunteers and are generally in good shape. Some have maintainers who are given grants by big corporate users that turn it into a job. And then there is everything else, including programs written as homework assignments by authors who barely remember them. "Open source has always been 'Use at your own risk,'" said Brian Behlendorf, who started the Open Source Security Foundation after decades of maintaining a pioneering free server software, Apache, and other projects at the Apache Software Foundation. "It's not free as in speech, or even free as in beer," he said. "It's free as in puppy, and it needs care and feeding." 40 teams entered the contest, according to the article - and seven received $1 million in funding to continue on to the next round, with the finalists to be announced at this year's Def Con, according to the article. "Under the terms of the DARPA contest, all finalists must release their programs as open source," the article points out, "so that software vendors and consumers will be able to run them."

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