Build It, Break It, Fix It
Abstract
Typical security contests focus on breaking or mitigating the impact of buggy systems. We present the Build-it, Break-it, Fix-it (BIBIFI) contest, which aims to assess the ability to securely build software, not just break it. In BIBIFI, teams build specified software with the goal of maximizing correctness, performance, and security. The latter is tested when teams attempt to break other teams’ submissions. Winners are chosen from among the best builders and the best breakers. BIBIFI was designed to be open-ended—teams can use any language, tool, process, and so on, that they like. As such, contest outcomes shed light on factors that correlate with successfully building secure software and breaking insecure software. We ran three contests involving a total of 156 teams and three different programming problems. Quantitative analysis from these contests found that the most efficient build-it submissions used C/C++, but submissions coded in a statically type safe language were 11× less likely to have a security flaw than C/C++ submissions. Break-it teams that were also successful build-it teams were significantly better at finding security bugs.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Pub Defense Publication
- Publication Date
- Apr 17, 2020
- Source ID
- 10.1145/3383773
Entities
People
- Andrew Ruef
- Daniel Votipka
- Dave Levin
- J. E. S. Parker
- Kelsey R. Fulton
- Michael Hicks
- Michelle L. Mazurek
- Piotr Mardziel
Organizations
- Carnegie Mellon University
- Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
- National Institute of Standards and Technology
- National Science Foundation
- University of Maryland