All posts in Awards

Rubicon received a distinguished paper award at EuroS&P 2025. “Microarchitectural” attacks such as Rowhammer and Spectre are often slow and unreliable. What if we had a generic mechanism to precisely place the security-sensitive data that we want to corrupt or leak at a target page to make these attacks precise and fast? Rubicon provides such…

Katharina Ceesay-Seitz has been awarded a Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship (QIF Europe) for her research proposal on a new verification methodology for Spectre v2 mitigations. The competition was fierce, with Katharina’s proposal being the only one that was awarded in the cyber security domain.

Matej Bölcskei has received an ETH medal for his master’s thesis on automatic RTL bug injection which resulted in a paper at USENIX Security. The ETH medal is awarded to the very top master theses every year. Congratulations!

A little while a go we wrote a paper about security problems in the microcode implementation and application of the IBPB instruction which acts as an important mechanism to mitigate different Spectre variants. As part of this work, we also built the first-ever cross-process Spectre attack that works on a real target. Furthermore, we showed…

REFault won the Best Paper Award at the 1st Microarchitecture Security Conference (uASC ’25). REFault builds an open-source solutions that turns commodity systems into research platforms for DDR5 memory.

ProTRR has been awarded the “Top Picks in Hardware and Embedded Security”. ProTRR is the first principled in-DRAM mitigation against Rowhammer attacks. It has heavily influenced the design of follow-up work on secure mitigations in both academia and industry. From the award website, Top Picks recognizes the best of the best in hardware security, spanning…

The PhD dissertation of Flavien Solt has won an ETH medal, given to the top 8% of dissertations at ETH Zurich. Congratulations!

The bachelor thesis of Max Wipfli on building Rowhammer attacks on AMD CPUs has won a best BSc award in the department. Congratulations! The new attack, that we called ZenHammer, could also trigger the first publicly known DDR5 bit flip on AMD Zen4-based platform. We later published an extended version of Max’s thesis at USENIX…

Kaveh Razavi received the Jochen Liedtke Young Researcher Award at EuroSys’24. The award was created in 2014 by ACM EuroSys to reward junior European researchers who have demonstrated exceptional creativity and innovation in systems research, broadly construed. Kaveh was awarded for “his countless and fundamental high-​​impact contributions to systems security”.

Phantom won the best paper award at MICRO’23! Phantom shows the security implications of pre-decode speculation that is fundamental in achieving high performance. Phantom explains the root-cause of previous transient execution attacks such as Retbleed or Spectre-SLS and it can also be used as a building block in other attacks, such as Inception.