STUDENT NEWS
CYBERSECURITY TEAM WINS $2 MILLION
TEAM ATLANTA, MADE UP OF YELLOW JACKETS, WON THE DARPA AI CYBER CHALLENGE SEMI-FINAL COMPETITION. THEY’LL COMPETE NEXT YEAR FOR THE $4 MILLION GRAND PRIZE.
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F O R T H R E E D A Y S , a c y b e rcriminal unleashed a crippling ransomware attack on the futuristic city of Northbridge. The attack shut down infrastructure and severely impacted public services, until Georgia Tech cybersecurity experts stepped in to stop it. This scenario played out at the DARPA AI Cyber Challenge (AIxCC) semifinal competition held at DEF CON 32 in Las Vegas Aug. 9–11. Team Atlanta, which included the Georgia Tech experts, was among the contest’s winners. Team Atlanta will now compete against six other teams in the final round that takes place at DEF CON 33 in August 2025. The finalists will keep their AI system and improve it over the next year using the $2 million semi-final prize. The AI systems in the finals must be open-sourced and ready for immediate, real-world launch. The
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BY JOHN POPHAM AIxCC final competition will award a $4 million grand prize to the ultimate champion. Team Atlanta is made up of alumni and Tech students and was put together with the help of Professor Taesoo Kim in Tech’s School of Cybersecurity and Privacy, who is a vice president of Samsung Research. “This achievement is the result of exceptional collaboration across various organizations, including the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), industr y partners like Samsung, and international academic institutions such as KAIST and POSTECH,” Kim says. “Our team, deeply rooted in Atlanta and largely composed of Georgia Tech alumni,
embodies the innovative spirit and community values that define our city.” The team tested their cyber reasoning system (CRS), dubbed Atlantis, on software used for data management, website support, healthcare systems, supply chains, electrical grids, transportation, and other critical infrastructures. Atlantis is a next-generation, bug-finding and fixing system that can hunt bugs in multiple coding languages. The system immediately issues accurate software patches without any human intervention. AIxCC is a Pentagon-backed initiative that was announced in August 2023 and will award up to $20 million in prize money throughout the competition.
THAT’S SO TECH: DE-BUGGING THE CYBER COMPETITION
Not only did Team Atlanta secure a spot in the final competition, but they also found a flaw in the contest itself. After noticing discrepancies in the AIxCC score board, the team investigated, discovered, and reported a zero-day vulnerability. These vulnerabilities are known as zero-day vulnerabilities because they are typically discovered after being exploited, meaning vendors have zero days to fix the issue. While the discovery didn’t earn Team Atlanta additional points, DARPA officials acknowledged their finding during the closing ceremony.