IEEE Cybersecurity Award Winners

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IEEE SecDev is pleased to again recognize great work from the community with the IEEE Cybersecurity Award for Practice and the IEEE Cybersecurity Award for Innovation.

Supported by MITRE, these awards recognize individuals and teams who have generated transformative cybersecurity capabilities and concepts, advancing the field overall via new approaches, leadership, and solutions.

This year’s recipient of the Award for Innovation is Allesandro Acquisti.

Alessandro Acquisti, Professor of Information Technology and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy, is recognized for his groundbreaking work on the economics and behavioral economics of privacy and personal information security.  His work has advanced the application of rigorous economic methodologies to the study of privacy risks and trade-offs, and has pioneered the application of behavioral economics to understand the hurdles individuals face in making privacy decisions. This work has been vastly influential among researchers, policy makers, and industry.

This year’s recipients of the Award for Practice are Lujo Bauer, Nicolas Christin, Lorrie Cranor, Saranga Komanduri,Michelle Mazurek, William Melicher, Sean Segreti, Rich Shay, and Blase Ur.

The award is for their body of work on passwords over the past 9 years. Briefly, they looked at the question of how we can make passwords easier for users yet harder for attackers to guess. Their work sheds light on this by developing a robust methodology for studying password strength and usability, and then using that methodology to show how better password policies and helpful feedback to users (powered by deep learning) can make passwords both more convenient and more secure. A good example of their work can be found here: https://www.archive.ece.cmu.edu/~lbauer/papers/cite.php?ref=meters:chi17

Congratulations to the 2018 IEEE Cybersecurity Award winners, and keep an eye out for the 2019 awards, to be awarded at 2019 IEEE SecDev.