CSD Faculty win two “Test of Time” awards at USENIX 2024

Tuesday, August 20, 2024 - by Michael Cunningham

Computer Science Department and Cylab researchers "Test of Time" award recipients Matt Fredrikson and Bryan Parno

Matt Fredrikson, associate professor in the Computer Science Department and  Software and Societal Systems Department (S3D), and Bryan Parno, professor in the Computer Science Department and Kavčić-Moura professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, were honored with prestigious “Test of Time” awards during the 33rd USENIX Security Symposium.

Held in Philadelphia on August 14-16, USENIX 2024 brought together experts from around the world, who highlighted the latest advances in the security and privacy of computer systems and networks. 

Fredrikson received the USENIX Security Test of Time Award for his co-authored paper Privacy in Pharmacogenetics: An End-to-End Case Study of Personalized Warfarin Dosing.

The USENIX Security Test of Time Award recognizes papers that have had a lasting impact on their fields. To qualify, a paper must have been presented at the USENIX Security Symposium at least 10 years ago. Fredrikson presented the paper with his co-authors at the 2014 USENIX Security Symposium in San Diego.

In their paper, Fredrikson and his colleagues initiated the study of privacy in pharmacogenetics, wherein machine learning models are used to guide medical treatments based on a patient’s genotype and background. As part of this work, they highlighted a new type of attack that could be used to learn information about the models' confidential training data, which poses risks beyond pharmacogenetics.

“This award is a huge honor for all of us, and we are thrilled to see this work continue to have an impact on the way that people study privacy issues with machine learning, even beyond the medical applications that we were focused on,” said Fredrikson.

Parno and a team of researchers that also features Carnegie Mellon University alumni Jonathan M. McCune and Hiroshi Isozaki, as well as former CyLab technical directors Michael K. Reiter and Adrian Perrig, won the Intel Hardware Security Academic Test of Time Award for their paper Flicker: An Execution Infrastructure for TCB Minimization Opens in new window.

Initially launched in 2021, the Intel Hardware Security Academic Test of Time Award recognizes a published paper that describes outstanding novel research with a meaningful impact on the hardware security ecosystem, including technologies created by Intel and industry partners. The Test of Time honors research published more than 10 years ago that has demonstrated a significant and lasting impact in the security field.

In their paper, originally published in 2008 when all of the team members were Carnegie Mellon researchers, Parno and his colleagues presented Flicker, an infrastructure for executing security-sensitive code in complete isolation while trusting as few as 250 lines of additional code.

“We're very honored and humbled to be receiving this award,” said Parno. “It's been exciting to see our research influence the design of hardware used by hundreds of millions of people, and we are thrilled to see that recognized by the community.”