Cyber Autonomy: Automating the Hacker- Self-healing, self-adaptive, automatic cyber defense systems and their impact to the industry, society and national security

In 2016, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) hosted the Cyber Grand Challenge (Song & Alves-Foss, 2015), a competition which invited participating finalist teams to develop automated cyber defense systems that can self-discover, prove, and correct software vulnerabilities at real-time - without human intervention. For the first time, the world witnessed hackers being automated at scale, i.e. cyber autonomy (Brumley, 2018). As the competition progressed, the systems were not only able to auto-detect and correct their software, but also able to attack other systems (other participants' machines) in the network. Even though the competition did not catch much mainstream media attention, the DARPA Cyber Grand Challenge proved the feasibility of cyber autonomy, stretched the imagination of the national and cyber security industries and created a mix of perceptions ranging from hope to fear - the hope of increasingly secure computing systems at scale, and the fear of current jobs such as penetration testing being automated.