There are few problems that money cannot solve. And with the US government waging a never-ending war against cyberattacks on its systems, the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has just decided to get its check book out. The agency has just announced a new competition for budding developers to design a “fully automated cyber defense system” that’ll be able to automatically analyze code, spot the weak spots, and repair them to ward off attacks.

Whoever wins the so-called “Cyber Grand Challenge” will walk away with a handsome $2 million in cash, although that won’t be for a while as defense chiefs are expecting the contest to run for the next three years. That might seem like a generously long time to write a few lines of code, but DARPA’s asking for something quite special in this instance:

“The [Cyber Grand Challenge] seeks to engender a new generation of autonomous cyber defense capabilities that combine the speed and scale of automation with reasoning abilities exceeding those of human experts,” says DARPA.

“In fully autonomous defense, a cyber system capable of reasoning about software will create its own knowledge, autonomously emitting and using knowledge quanta such as vulnerability scanner signatures, intrusion detection signatures, and security patches.”

The usual method (but not the only one) that hackers employ to break into computer systems is something called a “Zero Day” exploit – vulnerabilities in software that are only known to the hackers themseleves. As a result, software engineers and cybersecurity people are often left completely unaware that their systems have been compromised, until long after the fact.

So essentially, what DARPA’s asking for is software that’s capable of detecting an attack the moment it happens; analyzing exactly how it was exploited; and then automatically patching itself to block the hackers, whilst simultaneously sending a warning to technicians.

In addition, DARPA is also asking for software that’s capable of scanning itself for weaknesses, in order to identify Zero Days before hackers can do so:

“What if computers had a “check engine” light that could indicate new, novel security problems? What if computers could go one step further and heal security problems before they happen?” says DARPA on its website.Atlas robot

All well and good, but why make a competition out of it? Well, although the idea of a government agency staging a capture the flag-style content has actually been tried before, and it’s been a runaway success. This particular contest is inspired by a 2004 competition to build a self-driving car – the winner of that contest went on to help build Google’s famous driverless cars. In light of that success, and other projects like the terrifying Atlas robot DARPA recently built, it’s not a surprise to see the Pentagon outsourcing cyberdefense projects as well.