Can machines keep us safe from cyber-attack?

A different kind of artificial intelligence might soon be protecting us from malicious hackers

After robot cars and robot rescue workers, US research agency Darpa is turning its attention to robot hackers.

Best known for its part in bringing the internet into being, the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency has more recently brought engineers together to tackle what it considers to be "grand challenges".

Darpa ran a challenge to get engineers working on robots that could find their own way around disaster zones

These competitions try to accelerate research into issues it believes deserve greater attention  they gave rise to serious work on autonomous vehicles and saw the first stumbling steps towards robots that could help in disaster zones.

Next is a Cyber Grand Challenge that aims to develop software smart enough to spot and seal vulnerabilities in other programs before malicious hackers even know they exist.


"Currently, the process of creating a fix for a vulnerability is all people, and it's a process that's reactive and slow," said Mike Walker, head of the Cyber Grand Challenge at Darpa.

This counted as a grand challenge, he said, because of the sheer complexity of modern software and the fundamental difficulty one computer had in understanding what another was doing a problem first explored by computer pioneer Alan Turing.

He said the need for quick fixes would become more pressing as the world became populated by billions of small, smart net-connected devices - the so-called internet of things.

"The idea is that these devices will be used in such quantities that without automation we just will not be able to field any effective network defence," he said.

The cyber challenge climaxes this week at the Def Con hacker convention, where seven teams will compete to see whose software is the best hacker.