KAIST-Inclusive Consortium Advances to Finals of US AI Security Competition

Received 2.7 Billion Won Research Funding for Advancing to the Finals

A joint team including domestic university researchers has advanced to the finals of the 'AI Cyber Challenge,' a hacking system competition utilizing artificial intelligence (AI) led by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and will receive approximately 2.7 billion KRW in research funding.

Team Atlanta group photo. (Second row, second from the left) Professor Kim Taesu from Georgia Tech, (back row, first, second, and third from the left) KAIST PhD candidate Lee Haein, KAIST master's candidate Heo Hyun, KAIST PhD candidate Baek Minwoo

On the 21st, KAIST announced that the joint team 'Team Atlanta,' which includes the research lab of Professor Insoo Yoon from the Department of Electrical Engineering, passed the preliminary round of the AI-based next-generation hacking competition 'AI Cyber Challenge (AIxCC)' led by DARPA, and advanced to the finals scheduled for August next year. This competition holds significant importance both from the U.S. government and private sectors, with support from Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI.

Team Atlanta is a coalition team consisting of KAIST, Samsung Research, POSTECH, and Georgia Tech. It was mainly formed by members from the research lab of Professor Taesu Kim of Georgia Tech, who is currently serving as an executive director at Samsung Research. Professor Taesu Kim is also an alumnus of KAIST. Team Atlanta is the only coalition team including a domestic university to advance to the AI Cyber Challenge finals. Out of 39 teams worldwide that participated in the preliminaries, only 7 teams received tickets to the finals.

Professor Yoon In-su, KAIST

In this competition, each team's AI-based Cyber Reasoning Systems (CRS) automatically analyzed and patched problems by finding past vulnerabilities or artificially created vulnerabilities embedded in actual Linux operating system software. The evaluation was comprehensively based on how many vulnerabilities the AI discovered and how accurately it patched them.

Team Atlanta's CRS achieved the notable result of discovering a new vulnerability in the database program 'SQLite3' that was unintended by the challenge creators.

New Vulnerability Discovered by Team Atlanta

As a result of this achievement, Team Atlanta will receive $2 million in research funding (approximately 2.7 billion KRW) and will advance to the final competition held at DEF CON in August 2025, aiming for the championship.

Professor Insoo Yoon, a former 'white-hat hacker' expert in finding security system vulnerabilities, said, "Compared to previous competitions, the level of problems in this competition has significantly increased. It seems DARPA wants to test AI that hacks like a human," adding, "Since the finals are expected to present problems in more diverse programming languages and operating systems, we will do our best to combine AI and security to win."