Georgia Tech Makes History, Wins DARPA Challenge

Team Atlanta, a group of Georgia Tech students, faculty, and alumni, achieved international fame on Friday when they DARPA’s AI Cyber Challenge (AIxCC) and its $4 million grand prize.

AIxCC was a two-year long competition to create an artificial intelligence (AI) enabled cyber reasoning system capable of autonomously finding and patching vulnerabilities.

“This is a once in a generation competition organized by DARPA about how to utilize recent advancements in AI to use in security related tasks,” said Georgia Tech Professor Taesoo Kim.

“As hackers we started this competition as AI skeptics, but now we truly believe in the potential of adopting large language models (LLM) when solving security problems."

The Atlantis system was Team Atlanta’s submission. Atlantis is a fuzzer- or an automated software that finds vulnerabilities or bugs- and enhanced it with several different types of LLMs.

While developing the system, Team Atlanta reported the heat put out by the GPU rack was hot enough to roast marshmallows.

The team was comprised of hackers, engineers, and cybersecurity researchers. The Georgia Tech alumni on the team also represented their employers which include KAIST, POSTECH, and Samsung Research. Kim is also the vice president of Samsung Research. 

Image