This month, a hackathon in Orange County highlighted the battle to protect U.S. critical infrastructure.

Over a dozen students from Arizona State University, UC Santa Barbara, and Purdue University worked intensively to develop a program capable of scanning and fixing security flaws in millions of lines of open-source code without human help.

Sponsored by DARPA, the contest underscores the government’s view that flaws in open-source software are a major security threat and that AI is crucial for addressing it.

Open-source code, while not worse than proprietary software, often lacks rigorous testing, leading to costly breaches like the 2017 Equifax incident, The Washington Post has reported.

DARPA aims to leverage machines to keep pace with the vast amounts of code impacting various industries.

Written by B.C. Begley