News

iCTF 2025-26 Registration is Open

The iCTF 2025-2026 will take place from 9 March 2026, at 10 am Pacific Time, until 13 March 2026, at 4pm Pacific Time. iCTF was originally scheduled for the beginning of December 2025. Due to unforeseen circumstances, we had to postpone it.

IBM blog hails TOUCAN as new goldmine for tool-calling AI agents

An IBM blog post authored by Kim Martineau highlights how TOUCAN, a tool-calling dataset "of 1.5 million task scenarios, field-tested and open-sourced by IBM and University of Washington, is designed to improve how agents interact with the world and get things done." 

Keynote at ACM CCS by Giovanni Vigna

ACTION Director Giovanni Vigna delivered the first keynote talk at 2025 ACM CCS in Taipei, Taiwan. 

Autonomous Vulnerability Analysis, Triaging, and Repair: A Historical Perspective

Giovanni Vigna
​​​​​​UC Santa Barbara

The software components that support critical infrastructure are riddled with vulnerabilities, whose exploitation could cause service disruption, financial damage, and possibly loss of life.

Brooks Butler, Invited Lecture

Algorithmic Altruism in Autonomous Multi-Agent Systems

Brooks Butler
Postdoctoral Fellow
UC Irvine

Time: 11 am - 12 pm PT
Date: 6 October 2025
Location: Engineering Sciences Building 2003, UC Santa Barbara campus. 

Reversing Labs Blog on CVE-GENIE

A Reversing Labs blog post by Jaikumar Vijayan titled "CVE-Genie raises stakes in the vulnerability race" discusses the impacts of a new tool by ACTION researchers. 

Summer Experiences at Rutgers 2025

At Rutgers University, two REU students worked on topics related to ACTION in Summer 2025. William Guo (U Penn) and Edward Xiong (MIT) joined Professor Jie Gao on a project that models learning in a social network. The project will impact downstream ACTION research, for instance in groups of agents tasked with network defense. 

Summer Experiences at Norfolk State 2025

Last week Norfolk State University hosted their first ACTION-sponsored Capture the Flag training camps. They held a day camp from 9 am - 4 pm and a night camp from 6 pm - 9 pm, both at the campus Cybersecurity Complex. 

ACTION at the NITRD CSIA Working Group

Giovanni Vigna delivered an invited talk to the Cyber Security and Information Assurance Interagency Working Group (CSIA WG), the Federal Government’s group for coordinating federal investments and activities in cybersecurity R&D. This IWG is one of the coordinating groups of the Federal NITRD Program (https://nitrd.gov/). Throughout the year, the group explores a variety of topics, in order to coordinate federal research activities and to better understand what federally funded research in cybersecurity is needed.