Vice Chancellor Robert Cunningham's work awarded Best Paper Award by MIT's Lincoln Lab

Vice-Chancellor for Research and DINS Research Professor Dr. Robert Cunningham is the co-author of a paper that has won the Best Paper Award as part of MIT Lincoln Laboratory’s yearly competition. This award recognizes Lincoln Laboratory authors of the most outstanding published paper appearing in a peer-reviewed journal or peer-selected conference publication during an approximately one-year period preceding the award announcement. The authors of the winning selection will be awarded a plaque and a monetary award.

The paper titled "Adversary Safety by Construction in a Language of Cryptographic Protocols," was started when Dr. Cunningham was at Lincoln Lab and was published in Computer Security Foundations last fall. The paper describes a first effort to build a correct-by-construction tool for cryptographic protocols that are immune to attacks by Dolev-Yao-style adversaries. The analogy drawn in the paper is to Java and the move away from programming languages like C/C++, where it is easy to make security-relevant mistakes, to memory-safe languages like Java/Rust which prevent entire classes of vulnerabilities.