The US Defense Advanced Projects Agency (DARPA) ran a “Cyber Grand Challenge” in 2016, where automated cyber-attack and cyber-defense systems were pitted against each other to drive progress in autonomous cyber-security. The competition was run on physical computers (obviously), but Simics was used in a parallel flow to check that competitors’ programs were not trying to undermine the infrastructure of the competition rather than compete fairly inside the rules of the competition.
This “vetting” system was explained in a paper from 2018, and I have a blog post up on my Intel Blog about how Simics was used. Overall, the system that was built was very impressive – following the execution of software in a detailed manner to detect if it was trying to break out of the operating system sandbox in which it ran.
The researchers also connected Simics to the HexRays* IDA Pro* Debugger, including the enabling of Simics reverse execution from IDA. It is an excellent example of what you can do given extensible and programmable platforms like Simics (and IDA). In the presentation, the researchers end with a nice slide about “Bring Your Own Simics” 🙂
The paper is highly recommended: Cyber Grand Challenge (CGC) Monitor – A Vetting System for the DARPA Cyber Grand Challenge by Michael F. Thompson & Timothy Vidas.
My blog post: https://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2019/05/13/simics-software-automates-cyber-grand-challenge-validation