AI vuln-hunter bots have seen things you people wouldn't believe

Re: Impressive

> a lot of the technology we use wouldn't exist without the military looking for new weapons

I strongly doubt this.

Actually it's the military who pull in stuff from the civilian sphere, add their own opportunity cost and paint it in olive for no real advantage.

Re: Impressive

The really impressive system was the one which ignored the competition, hacked the conference twitter account and sent messages declaring itself to be the winner to all the news media

Re: :-)

I have to own a piece of those observations given my roles in the military. It's the usual case that someone comes along and gives us a wedgie before we become dead serious about the nature of the next battles/war.

Umm, this is realistic

Actually you might be surprised at how far this has come since the competition. You should go look at the Cyber Grand Challenge site and the results of it. They have some great videos and commentary about the competition and results. The systems involved actually were given only compiled code and no source. They then analyzed the code, developed exploits and defenses, and attacked each other with no human intervention. That is what made it so amazing.

The other part of the story is that the software and environment the systems were working in was intentionally limited and isolated. They ran in a reduced environment that was simpler than the software environment that is found on a typical PC or notebook.

The programs introduced to the systems had been coded with flaws that often were similar to major flaws that have been found in common real world software. In addition to identifying what they were meant to find, the systems also found and exploited errors that the authors did not know were there.

The surprising thing about the results were that many people thought this level of performance was not possible. Earlier rounds of the competition did not show nearly as much promise but the actual competition provided many surprises to many of us in the industry. It is the speed of progress that is part of the surprise in addition to the results.

And yes, the systems were able to look at other systems attacks and use that knowledge to patch their own systems and attack others. All this without software or additional knowledge. This behavior is a common thing in attack/defend style cyber CTF competitions played among humans and it is not surprising that the authors of the CRS knew this and incorporated this behavior too.

There are several companies (for example Trails of Bits, who I am in no way affiliated with but they have a blog post up on the subject called "Automated Code Audit’s First Customer" in which the same principles (even some of the same CRS code) was used on unrestricted real world software for analysis with great success. This stuff is already in the real world and expected to be more mainstream in 2017.

Re: Let's be realistic

If you think about this situation using closed software like MS Windows, I would agree, if you think about this situation with opensource I would disagree.

WRT to using Open source, you have one AI spotting the problems (Ai1), another AI (Ai2) can rewrite the code randomly, put each iteration up for testing with Ai1. If Ai1 gives it a pass, code is committed. Job Done.

If you are familiar with coding, how long does it take to change something and recompile it? Perhaps the wrong data type was used for a variable, a String when it should have been a Cstring or Long and the inherent boundary checks datatypes bring to the table.

Its not hard to do, I even wrote a system in the 00's which rewrote software from procedural toOOP code, converting ISAM to SQL data sources. What the software house thought would take 3 months based on their own programmers experience, took me 1 week to write the convertor, and a few hours for the convertor to run and rewrite the software. Still got paid that 3months though.

Its just evolution on "steroids" albeit in the silicon domain and not the wider world where we have not even been able to quantify the effect different chemicals have on the long and short decision making process that affect animals including humans.

Lets face it, I could say something offensive to you whilst you are sober and you wont react, give you some drugs like alcohol which affects your liver and cholesterol production which in turn affects the production of various other hormones that can then go on and affect your judgement, and then you might be able to see how our decision making processes are so widely affected by the chemicals/drugs we choose to ingest, inhale, rub or spray on ourselves.

Look at this image to see how the liver which produces around 80% of your cholesterol is converted into different hormones. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cholesterol#/media/File:Steroidogenesis.svg

Lets not forget the metabolites of alcohol take 14 days to be broken down by the Liver.

So lets not kid ourselves that we are in control of our emotions or decision making processes, hey?

Standardised mass market foods go some way to standardise the emotions of humans which in turn helps the legal profession maintain their authority over us by ignoring inconvenient facts like how data you may have been exposed to at some previous point in time coupled with your chemistry at the time can determine future behaviour/reactions which much of main stream science is just scraping the surface on.

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0051959

http://www.lifeextension.com/Magazine/2007/11/report_pregnenolone/Page-01

"Scientists from the VA Medical Center in St. Louis explored pregnenolone’s benefits in memory retention using a conditioning task in animals that involved learning to avoid a mild electric shock to the foot.37,38 To their surprise, they discovered that pregnenolone displayed beneficial effects in improving memory retention at almost incredibly low doses.1 They also found the response to pregnenolone was much faster than expected had the supplement been working like a typical neurosteroid, leading to the conclusion that something much more dramatic was going on."

What I take away from this, is that humans with no sex drive is a medical marker to show they are not functioning properly, and considering the weighting we give to old people's influence over our lives, think House of Lords as one example, is society as a whole set up to fail due to the faulty memories and decision making processes of old people with no sex drive, whilst still only allowing alcohol to be dominant recreational drug for society, considering how it affects both short term and long term memories by affecting the cholesterol production and other liver functions?

Lets not forget Liver is Latin for life.

Its also interesting how producing so much of the stress hormones can cause ill health by removing/reducing the other hormones which would normally be produced. So whilst stress hormones can increase spatial intelligence as a species are we setting ourselves up for failure in the future, as we know stress hormones affect the ability to remember and learn?

Studies already show Westerner kids have lower IQ levels.

Are Western countries suffering the intellectual effects of a baby boomer generation not able to think properly for themselves?