NSA Sponsored and Community Competitions

BEST SCIENTIFIC CYBER-SECURITY PAPER COMPETITION

The Best Scientific Cyber-security Paper Competition is sponsored by the NSA Research Directorate to promote rigorous research methods by identifying and highlighting excellence. The competition is open to all authors and nominated papers are evaluated by a panel of distinguished experts in cybersecurity. Winners are invited to NSA for recognition and to present their research. Find out more about the competition and the past winners at https://cps-vo.org/group/sos/papercompetition

NSA RESEARCH DIRECTORATE AWARD AT ISEF

The Annual Intel International Science of Engineering Fair (ISEF) is the world's largest international pre-college science competition with approximately 1,800 high school students from more than 75 countries, regions, and territories. The award recognizes outstanding scientific accomplishment in cybersecurity. For more information, see: https://cps-vo.org/group/SoS/ISEF

CONFERENCE BEST PAPER AWARDs

The Hot Topics in Science of Security (HoTSoS) Best Paper Award recognizes the paper that exhibits outstanding achievement in science. Papers are selected by the HoTSoS Program Committee. The winning paper is automatically nomination into the Annual Best Scientific Paper Competition. The first year for the award was 2018.

  • 2019: Integrated Data Space Randomization and Control Reconfiguration for Securing Cyber-Physical Systems by Bradley Potteiger, Zhenkai Zhang and Xenofon Koutsoukos of Vanderbilt University URL: https://cps-vo.org/node/59879
  • 2018: Robustness of Deep Autoencoder in Intrusion Detection under Adversarial Contamination by Pooria Madani and Natalija Vlajic of University of York. URL: https://cps-vo.org/hotsos18/madani

The Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS) Distinguished Paper Award is sponsored by NSA SoS with a cash prize. The paper is selected by the conference organizers in regard to attributes that include scientific merit, generalizability, rigorness of research and clarity of writing. Winning paper is automatically nominated to the Annual Best Scientific Paper Competition. Sponsorship began in 2018.

  • 2018: "I've Got Nothing to Lose": Consumers' Risk Perceptions and Protective Actions after the Equifax Data Breach by Yixin Zou, Abraham H. Mhaidli, Austin McCall, and Florian Schaub from the School of Information, University of Michigan. URL: https://www.usenix.org/conference/soups2018/presentation/zou

CONFERENCE BEST POSTER AWARDs

The Best Poster Award at the HoT Topics in Science of Security (HoTSoS) symposium recognizes cybersecurity research with scientific rigor, clarity of presentation, and global impact. It is to encourage scientists across multiple disciplines to address the fundamental problems of security in a principled manner. Award is decided by NSA's SoS Technical lead with input from experts in SoS. Award began in 2017

  • 2019: A Synopsis Of Static Analysis Alerts On Open Source Software by Nasif Imtiaz and Laurie Williams from North Carolina State University
  • 2018: What Proportation of Culnerabilities Can be Attributed to Ordinary Coding Errors? by Rick Kuhn, Mohammad Raunak, and Raghu  Kacker from NIST and Loyola University
  • 2017: Is the Guardian Capable? A Routine Activity Theory Approach to Cyber Instrusion on Honeypot Systems by Michael Becker, Michel Cukier, and David Maimon form University of Maryland.