SoK: DARPA's AI Cyber Challenge (AIxCC): Competition Design, Architectures, and Lessons Learned

Authors:Cen Zhang, Younggi Park, Fabian Fleischer, Yu-Fu Fu, Jiho Kim, Dongkwan Kim, Youngjoon Kim, Qingxiao Xu, Andrew Chin, Ze Sheng, Hanqing Zhao, Michael Pelican, David J. Musliner, Jeff Huang, Jon Silliman, Mikel Mcdaniel, Jefferson Casavant, Isaac Goldthwaite, Nicholas Vidovich, Matthew Lehman, Taesoo Kim

Abstract:DARPA's AI Cyber Challenge (AIxCC, 2023--2025) is the largest competition to date for building fully autonomous cyber reasoning systems (CRSs) that leverage recent advances in AI -- particularly large language models (LLMs) -- to discover and remediate vulnerabilities in real-world open-source software. This paper presents the first systematic analysis of AIxCC. Drawing on design documents, source code, execution traces, and discussions with organizers and competing teams, we examine the competition's structure and key design decisions, characterize the architectural approaches of finalist CRSs, and analyze competition results beyond the final scoreboard. Our analysis reveals the factors that truly drove CRS performance, identifies genuine technical advances achieved by teams, and exposes limitations that remain open for future research. We conclude with lessons for organizing future competitions and broader insights toward deploying autonomous CRSs in practice.

Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2602.07666 [cs.CR]

(or arXiv:2602.07666v5 [cs.CR] for this version)