GrammaTech Wins $1 Million Prize in DARPA’s Artificial Intelligence Cyber Challenge (AIxCC)
BETHESDA, Md., March 13, 2024 (Newswire.com) - GrammaTech, Inc., a leading provider of cybersecurity services and tools that improve and accelerate software development, along with researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Virginia, has been selected as one of the winners of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)’s AI Cyber Challenge’s Small Business Track Competition! DARPA received a robust response of competitive submissions from small businesses for this opportunity, and GrammaTech’s team, VERSATIL, scored in the top seven. GrammaTech’s team will receive $1 million in prize money and the distinction of competing in the AIxCC Semifinal Competition (ASC) as a Small Business Track competitor.
The Artificial Intelligence Cyber Challenge (AIxCC) is a two-year competition asking leading AI companies, like GrammaTech, to work with DARPA to defend the software that everyone relies on. The growing importance of software in modern life creates an ever-expanding attack surface for malicious actors. New AI-enabled technology can address this cybersecurity problem. AIxCC asks competitors to design novel AI systems to secure critical code and will award a cumulative $29.5 million in prizes to teams with the best systems.
GrammaTech’s team combines technology and expertise from industry and academia. Built upon its system that won second prize at DARPA’s 2016 Cyber Grand Challenge, and its commercial successor Proteus, GrammaTech's latest advances multiply the effectiveness of state-of-the-art static and dynamic analysis tools by leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs). The system will use LLMs to find potential vulnerabilities, guide and customize vulnerability discovery analyses, and generate patches to fix the vulnerabilities. An invaluable resource in support of the industry drive for Secure-by-Design, the system will automatically find and repair vulnerabilities at scale.
AIxCC competitions will occur at one of the world’s top cybersecurity conferences, DEF CON. The semifinal competition will be at DEF CON 2024, and the final competition at DEF CON 2025, where the top prize will be $4 million.
Ray DeMeo, Chief Growth Officer at GrammaTech, said: “This is GrammaTech’s second AI award in the first months of 2024. It reflects the caliber of our team and decades-long reputation for solving the hardest cybersecurity problems. GrammaTech’s combination of talent and technology being leveraged here are uniquely suited to next-level growth of our already formidable offerings for identifying vulnerabilities, automating remediation, and securing supply chains across the full software, firmware, and microelectronics compute stack, now a top priority for information processing and inference at the edge.”
About GrammaTech:
GrammaTech is a provider of advanced cybersecurity services and developer of software-assurance solutions. Originating from the computer science department at Cornell University, the company has a 35-year history of delivering cutting-edge cyber capability in support of government, intelligence, and mission-critical infrastructure. GrammaTech offerings are leveraged by software developers and system defenders alike, everywhere reliability and security are paramount. They cover threat detection and mitigation, malware analysis, machine learning and automation, migration to memory-safe languages, attack surface area reduction, and software supply chain integrity.
Source: GrammaTech
