Bryan Parno honored with the IEEE Cybersecurity Award for Practice

Friday, October 11, 2024 - by Michael Cunningham

From left: Bryan Parno accepts the IEEE Cybersecurity Award for Practice from Greg Shannon, Award Committee member, at the 2024 IEEE Secure Development Conference

Bryan Parno, Kavčić-Moura Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Professor of Computer Science, has received the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Cybersecurity Award for Practice for his contributions to the theory and practice of end-to-end secure systems.

Parno accepted the award from Greg Shannon, Award Committee member, at the IEEE Secure Development Conference, held at the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute October 7-10, 2024.

“This recognition means a great deal to me, and I am truly grateful to all of the people I've worked with and learned from who made this possible,” said Parno.

The IEEE Computer Society Cybersecurity Award for Practice is intended to recognize individuals and small teams who have generated transformative cybersecurity capabilities that have had an impact on the real world.

Parno’s research is primarily focused on investigating long-term, fundamental improvements in how to design and build secure systems.

“End-to-end security has been a major focus of my work, since it forces us to think systematically about all possible ways an adversary might attack the system,” said Parno. “When it’s successful, we can provide the strong guarantees that users expect in their digital lives.”

In July, Parno was a member of a team of researchers that received the 36th International Conference on Computer Aided Verification (CAV) Distinguished Paper Award for the tool paper A Framework for Debugging Automated Program Verification Proofs via Proof Actions.

And in August, Parno and a team of researchers that also features Carnegie Mellon University alumni Jonathan M. McCune and Hiroshi Isozaki, as well as former CyLab technical directors Michael K. Reiter and  Adrian Perrig, won the Intel Hardware Security Academic Test of Time Award for their paper Flicker: An Execution Infrastructure for TCB Minimization.

In winning the IEEE Cybersecurity Award for Practice, Parno joins previous CyLab faculty honorees Nicolas Christin, Lujo Bauer, and Lorrie Cranor, as well as Alessandro Acquisti, a past recipient of the the IEEE Cybersecurity Award for Innovation.

IEEE is the world’s largest technical professional organization dedicated to advancing technology for the benefit of humanity.