A $5,000 research award donated by UC Berkeley alum and cybersecurity expert Tim M. Mather ‘81 funded a UC Berkeley student-led research team’s entry into the Artificial Intelligence Cyber Challenge (AIxCC). This national competition is sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a research and development agency of the U.S. Department of Defense.
The goal of the team’s project, “A CodeLM Automated Repair Program with Analysis, Planning, and Control,” was to develop an automated, AI-based code repair solution that combines both vulnerability detection and patch generation. The team’s members included Samuel Berston, a student in the UC Berkeley School of Information’s Master of Information and Cybersecurity (MICS) program; Marlon Fu, a student in the Master of Information and Data Science (MIDS) program; Marsalis Gibson, a PhD student in the UC Berkeley Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS); and MICS students Katelynn Hernandez, Francisco Laplace, Gerald Musumba, Narayanan Potti, Ansuv Sikka, and Lawrence Wagner.
The team’s project was accepted into the competition, accelerating them to become semi-finalists. While the group did not compete in-person at DEF CON 2024 in Las Vegas, their participation had a significant impact on the entire competition. The team discovered a serious vulnerability within the files provided by DARPA as part of the challenge, which they reported to the organizers, leading DARPA to send a security patch to all participants.
We interviewed the team’s tech lead, Marsalis Gibson, to learn more about the team’s experience...
Excerpt from “UC Berkeley Student Research Team Discovers Cybersecurity Vulnerability in National Competition;” by the Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity on September 30, 2024.
