In 2004, the United States Defense Advanced Research Agency (DARPA) held its first Grand Challenge Competition. The challenge was to build an autonomous vehicle that could navigatea 150-mile route through the Mojave Desert. This competition and subsequent ones spurred interest and innovation and today, less than 15 years later,self-driving carsare soon to become commonplace on our highways.

In 2013, DARPA announced the Cyber Grand Challenge (CGC). The challenge was to build an autonomous cyber reasoning system that could analyze software, identify vulnerabilities, formulate patches and deploy them on a network all in real time. On August 4, 2016 at DEFCON 24 in Las Vegas, Nevada, an audience of 22,000 watched seven extraordinary machines compete in a historic, first ever machine vs. machine CTF contest with the winner receiving a $2M cash prize.In this talk I will describe the CGC competition,present some of the unique challenges faced by the teams, and provide an overview oftechnologies used to address these challenges. I will also present analysis of the telemetry collected during the CGC final event. Based on this analysis, I will argue thatthe CGC resultsshow the promiseof deployed autonomous cyber reasoning systems within a few years.