digital initiatives logo library logo

University of Idaho News Archive

Please Note: these news items were harvested in September 2015. Some functionality has been disabled. Links may be broken or out of date.
For current news, please visit UI News.

UI Team Advances in Cyber Grand Challenge Tournament

Wednesday, July 8


A team from the University of Idaho’s Center for Secure and Dependable Systems (CSDS) is in a heated competition to increase cybersecurity in the United States.

CSDS — a two-person team led by center director Jim Alves-Foss, who is working with post-doctoral fellow Jia Song — placed second and is one of seven teams to advance to the final round of the Cyber Grand Challenge, sponsored by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

The contest challenged hackers and computer scientists around the world to create an automated cybersecurity network that can detect and stop threats without human assistance. It began with more than 100 teams a year ago. Twenty-eight of those teams made it into a qualifying event in June. As one of the finalists, the CSDS will receive $750,000 to prepare for the final competition, which will be held in August 2016 in Las Vegas in conjunction with DEF CON. The teams will have access to a specialized IT infrastructure and a “digital arena” where they can test their systems.

“We knew we had the potential to be successful after our software placed in the top 5 during two practice events hosted by DARPA in December and April,” Alves-Foss says. “We developed an innovative approach that allowed us to compete against much larger, better funded and better equipped teams fielded by some of the top cyber-security researchers in the nation.”

The winner of the competition will receive $2 million. Second place receives a $1 million prize and third place $750,000.                                       

“After two years of asking ‘What if?’ and challenging teams around the world with a very difficult series of preliminary events, we’ve shown that there is a place for computers in an adversarial contest of the mind that until now has belonged solely to human experts,” said Mike Walker, DARPA program manager.

Cyber Grand Challenge finalists are ranked based on performance, security and continued service availability of patched software as well as documenting security vulnerability.  The UI CSDS team placed second in the final group of seven that includes teams from the University of California, Berkeley and Santa Barbara, security researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and a team of engineers from defense contractor giant Raytheon Company.

UI’s team built its software entirely from scratch, funded in part by a grant from the Idaho IGEM program, after being declined seed-funds from DARPA.

Alves-Foss says the competitors’ automated defense systems are currently designed to work with DARPA's special DECREE operating environment, an extension to the Linux operating system, and will not currently work with commercial operating systems. He and Song have plans to migrate their software suite to commercial operating systems after they finish competition in the final event.

“As a locally funded team of two, we have not had too much time to think about future expansions of the tool suite,” Alves-Foss says.

“But the experience of competing in this competition has put us on a solid foundation for success,” Song says.

Find out more about the Center for Secure and Dependable Systems at www.csds.uidaho.edu.

Related media coverage:

DARPA news release: www.darpa.mil/news-events/2015-07-08

The Washington Post: www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2015/07/08/how-the-audacious-pentagon-agency-that-invented-the-internet-is-now-trying-to-save-it/

Slate: www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2015/05/06/darpa_s_mike_walker_prepares_for_the_cyber_grand_challenge_qualifying_round.html

The Verge: www.theverge.com/2015/7/8/8911493/darpa-cyber-grand-challenge-finalists-defcon





About the University of Idaho
The University of Idaho helps students to succeed and become leaders. Its land-grant mission furthers innovative scholarly and creative research to grow Idaho's economy and serve a statewide community. From its main campus in Moscow, Idaho, to 70 research and academic locations statewide, U-Idaho emphasizes real-world application as part of its student experience. U-Idaho combines the strength of a large university with the intimacy of small learning communities. It is home to the Vandals. For information, visit www.uidaho.edu.