If only computers themselves were smart enough to fight off malevolent hackers.
That is the premise of an ambitious two-year contest with a $2 million first prize, posed to the world’s computer programmers by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, better known by its acronym, Darpa. It is the blue-sky, big-think organization within the Defense Department that created a precursor of the Internet in the late 1960s and more recently held a contest that spurred development of self-driving cars.
Michael Walker, the Darpa cybersecurity program manager who is running the contest, imagines a future in which sensors on computer networks could detect intruders, identify the flaws that let them in, and automatically make the necessary repairs, all without a human computer expert lifting a finger.