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Criswell's Dissertation Receives Honorable Mention from ACM

May 5, 2015

John Criswell, an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science, was awarded one of two honorable mentions for the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award.  ACM presents these awards each year to the top doctoral dissertations in Computer Science.  This is the second honorable mention for Criswell’s dissertation; Criswell was awarded the honorable mention for the ACM SIGOPS Dennis M. Ritchie Doctoral Dissertation Award last year.

Criswell’s dissertation, Secure Virtual Architecture: Security for Commodity Software Systems, describes his work on creating the Secure Virtual Architecture (SVA) and how its compiler-based capabilities can protect both application code and commodity operating system kernel code from sophisticated attacks.  Using SVA, Criswell has created systems that protect operating system kernels, like Linux and FreeBSD, from memory safety attacks as well as systems that protect applications from kernel-level malware.