"UChicago Researchers Win Internet Defense Prize and Distinguished Paper Awards at USENIX Security"
At this year's USENIX Security Symposium, faculty and students from the University of Chicago's (UChicago) Department of Computer Science won two Distinguished Paper Awards and the 2023 Internet Defense Prize. A team from Associate Professor Blase Ur's SUPERgroup received the Distinguished Paper Award for their research on the university's passwords' vulnerability to password reuse-related attacks. These types of attacks are possible when a UChicago affiliate creates an account on another service, such as LinkedIn, using a password similar to their UChicago password, and then that other service is breached. The researchers discovered that thousands of UChicago accounts were vulnerable to these attacks. These vulnerabilities often persisted for years and were sometimes actively exploited by malicious actors. This article continues to discuss the Glaze Project and SUPERgroup's collaborative research on the vulnerability of the university's passwords to attacks leveraging password reuse.