Evolving Assembly Code in an Adversarial Environment

In this work, we evolve assembly code for the CodeGuru competition. The competition's goal is to create a survivor -- an assembly program that runs the longest in shared memory, by resisting attacks from adversary survivors and finding their weaknesses. For evolving top-notch solvers, we specify a Backus Normal Form (BNF) for the assembly language and synthesize the code from scratch using Genetic Programming (GP). We evaluate the survivors by running CodeGuru games against human-written winning survivors. Our evolved programs found weaknesses in the programs they were trained against and utilized them. In addition, we compare our approach with a Large-Language Model, demonstrating that the latter cannot generate a survivor that can win at any competition. This work has important applications for cyber-security, as we utilize evolution to detect weaknesses in survivors. The assembly BNF is domain-independent; thus, by modifying the fitness function, it can detect code weaknesses and help fix them. Finally, the CodeGuru competition offers a novel platform for analyzing GP and code evolution in adversarial environments. To support further research in this direction, we provide a thorough qualitative analysis of the evolved survivors and the weaknesses found.