The Past, Present, and Future of Cyberdyne

Cyberdyne is a distributed system that discovers vulnerabilities in third-party, off-the-shelf binary programs. It competed in all rounds of DARPA’s Cyber Grand Challenge (CGC). In the qualifying event, Cyberdyne was the second most effective bug-finding system. In the final event, it was the bug-finding arm of the fourth-place team. Since then, Cyberdyne has been successfully applied during commercial code audits. The first half of this article describes the evolution and implementation of Cyberdyne and its bug-finding tools. The second half of the article looks at what it took to have Cyberdyne audit real applications and how we performed the first paid automated security audit for the Mozilla Secure Open Source Fund. We conclude with a discussion about the future of automated security audits.