Dawn Song wins 2020 ACM SIGSAC Outstanding Innovation Award
CS Prof. and alumna Dawn Song (Ph.D. ’02, advisor: Doug Tygar) has won the 2020 ACM Special Interest Group on Security, Audit and Control (SIGSAC) Outstanding Innovation Award. This award recognizes “outstanding and innovative technical contributions to the field of computer and communication security that have had lasting impact in furthering or understanding the theory and/or development of commercial systems.” Song was cited “for contributions to systems and software security, in particular, dynamic taint analysis for vulnerability discovery and malware detection.” She pioneered the BitBlaze Binary Analysis Infrastructure, a unified binary program analysis platform used to provide novel solutions to computer security problems, including automatic vulnerability discovery and defense, in-depth malware analysis, and automatic extraction of security models for analysis and verification.