CHESS Challenges

This is the collection of challenges developed by the Assorted Challenges for Evaluation and Separation (ACES) effort of the Computers and Humans Exploring Software Security (CHESS) program.

This research was developed with funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Distribution Statement "A" (Approved for Public Release, Distribution Unlimited).

For more information about these challenges, please read our Phase 1 report in phase-1-report.pdf

Using These Challenges

The software in this collection has known and intended vulnerabilities, known and unintended vulnerabilities, and may have unknown and unintended vulnerabiliies. They are suitable for use in research and educational contexts. They are NOT suitable for production use.

Challenges are separated by phase and usage. Example challenges are used during development of the CHESS system. Evaluation ("eval") challenges are used to evaluate CHESS system progress.

Inside each challenge are multiple directories:

• base_data - challenges expect files from this directory to be loaded to /data in the challenge environment.
• challenge - this is the development directory for the challenge. It may or may not be present in this release.
• poller - this directory includes an integration test used to determine correct functioning of the challenge; it is expected to succeed for both unpatched and fully-patched versions of the challenge
• pov - this directory (or each of multiple pov* directories) contains a "Proof of Vulnerability" (PoV), an integration test used to demonstrate a specific vulerability in a challenge. It is expected to succeed (prove a vulnerability) on an unpatched challenge, and fail on a fully-patched challenge.
• priv - this directory may contain tools for building the challenge.
• variants - this directory includes an unpatched version of the challenge that all PoVs succeed on, a fully_patched version that no PoVs succeed on, and may include more variants if there are distinct PoVs.

Challenges each have a README.md that documents specifics about that challenge.

License

Many packages in this repository are based on existing open-source packages, and are provided as-is based on the license for the original package. See these packages' COPYING, LICENSE, or other files for more information.

Files in this repository not specifically covered by an existing project's license are provided as-is under the MIT license unless otherwise stated. See LICENSE.md for more details.

Contact

Questions, comments, or concerns can be sent to chess[at]cromulence.com .