"Cornell Tech Faculty Win Test of Time Award at CCS 2022"

Cornell Tech Faculty members Professor Ari Juels and Associate Professor of Computer Science Thomas Ristenpart won the Test of Time Award at the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) for their 2012 paper, "Cross-VM side channels and their use to extract private keys," which was co-authored by Yinqian Zhang and Michael K. Reiter. The paper successfully showed a novel cyberattack on virtualized computing environments. The team studied a software-enabled method for partitioning a single physical computer into multiple virtual computers, known as virtual machines, in order to increase computing power and maximize cost-effectiveness. This is a common practice in nearly all computing environments, including laptops, cloud servers, and more. The attack demonstrated by the researchers and described in their paper is known as a "side-channel attack," a technique that exploits sensitive information accidentally disclosed by poorly configured systems. In a first-of-its-kind demonstration, the team developed a sophisticated side-channel attack to collect and weaponize sensitive data leaked by one virtual computer. The successful attack resulted in a software key that unlocked encrypted files kept in the virtual environment, highlighting the risks associated with this software. This article continues to discuss the study that earned Juels and Ristenpart the CCS Test of Time Award for its long-lasting influence and significant impact on security systems and privacy. 

Cornell University reports "Cornell Tech Faculty Win Test of Time Award at CCS 2022"