Winning Paper | Honorable Mention | Review Team
The ninth NSA Competition for Best Scientific Cybersecurity Paper recognizes the best scientific cybersecurity paper published in 2020. Papers were nominated between December 15, 2020 through April 15, 2021 and 34 nominations were received.
Winning Paper
The winning paper selected is On One-way Functions and Kolmogorov Complexity by Yanyi Liu from Cornell University and Rafael Pass from Cornell Tech. The paper was published at the 2020 IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science. One-way functions are a key underpinning in many modern cryptography systems, and were first proposed in 1976 by Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman. These functions can be efficiently computed but are difficult to reverse, as determining the input based on the output is computationally expensive. One-way functionss are vital components of modern symmetric encryptions, digital signatures, authentic schemes, and more. Until now, it has been assumed that one-way functions exist even though research shows that they are both necessary and sufficient for much of the security provided by cryptography.
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Honorable Mention
Receiving honorable mention was the paper Retrofitting Fine Grain Isolation in the Firefox Renderer written by Shravan Narayan, Craig Disselhoen, Tal Garfinkel, Nathan Froyd, Sorin Lerner, Eric Rahm, Hovav Shacham, and Deian Stefan. This paper was originally published at the USENIX Security Conference 2020 and provides a security solution for use in the Firefox web browser while also demonstrating that this technology can be utilized for other situations. The solution, RLBox, is a culmination of many advances that enable software to securely use software components, such as libraries, which have not been verified as trustworthy. RLBox has been incorporated into Firefox 95.
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Review Team
NSA Competition Leads:
| Gilbert Herrera - NSA Director of Research Dr. Adam Tagert - Science of Security, NSA Laboratory for Advanced Cybersecurity Research |
The following individuals served as distinguished experts for the 7th annual competition:
| DR. WHITFIELD DIFFIE, Cybersecurity Advisor PROF. KATHLEEN FISHER, Tufts University DR. DAN GEER, In-Q-Tel DR. ERIC GROSSE, Cybersecurity Advisor DR. JOHN LAUNCHBURY, Galois, Inc |
DR. SEAN PEISERT, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory PROF. STEFAN SAVAGE, University of California, San Diego MR. PHIL VENABLES, Goldman Sachs DR. ARUN VISHWANATH, Cybersecurity Advisor MS. MARY ELLEN ZURKO, MIT Lincoln Laboratory |
About the Competition
The Best Scientific Cybersecurity Paper Competition is sponsored yearly by NSA's Research Directorate and reflects the Agency's desire to increase scientific rigor in the cybersecurity field. This competition was established to recognize current research that exemplifies the development of scientific rigor in cybersecurity research. SoS is a broad enterprise, involving both theoretical and empirical work across a diverse set of topics. While there can only be one best paper, no single paper can span the full breadth of SoS topics. Nevertheless, work in all facets of security science is both needed and encouraged.