Our paper „A Highly Accurate Query-Recovery Attack against Searchable Encryption using Non-Indexed Documents”, which we published at the reputable USENIX Security 2021 Symposium, was shortlisted for the „Dutch Cyber Security best Research Paper (DCSRP)” award, which puts it among the top-3 cybersecurity research papers with Dutch co-authorship!

An international jury, consisting of Prof. dr. Sascha Fahl (Leibniz University Hannover & CISPA, Germany), Prof. dr. Patrick Schaumont (Worcester Polytechnic Institute, MA, USA) and Dr. Magnus Almgren (Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden), selected the top-3 research articles out of a total of 9 nominations. The top-3 nominated papers are:

1. “A Highly Accurate Query-Recovery Attack against Searchable Encryption using Non-Indexed Documents” by Marc Damie, Florian Hahn, and Andreas Peter;
2. “Blind Side: Speculative Probing: Hacking Blind in the Spectre Era” by Enes Goktas, Kaveh Razavi, Georgios Portokalidis, Herbert Bos, and Cristiano Giuffrida;
3. “TRRespass: Exploiting the Many Sides of Target Row Refresh” by Pietro Frigo, Emanuele Vannacci, Hasan Hassan, Victor van der Veen, Onur Mutlu, Cristiano Giuffrida, Herbert Bos, and Kaveh Razavi.

The award ceremony took place on May 19, 2022 in Enschede (Netherlands) as part of the FUSION 2022 event.

Here's a short summary of the jury report:

1. The Query-Recovery Attack paper is an excellent example of rigorous foundational research, and it achieves a real impact with real-world deployments. The authors have also put great effort into transparency and reproducibility of their research, what is very important for the community.
2. The BlindSide paper provides an important generalization of the speculative attacks, bringing together many findings from the Spectre era and demonstrating new kinds of attacks. The authors have also made a very substantial effort to make the paper accessible to a wider audience, including students, by creating educational videos and artifacts.
3. The TRRespass paper shows that RowHammer attacks still have not been satisfactorily addressed in practice. It also demonstrates the important role of security researchers today, who keep the industry claims in check. The paper sends the strong message that to achieve better security industry should be open to the research community.

The award went to the paper „TRRespass: Exploiting the Many Sides of Target Row Refresh” by Pietro Frigo, Emanuele Vannacci, Hasan Hassan, Victor van der Veen, Onur Mutlu, Cristiano Giuffrida, Herbert Bos, and Kaveh Razavi. We are very happy that we made it to the top-3 of shortlisted nominations.

Here’s the link to our nominated paper: link

Official news item on the ACCSS website: link