Category Archives: Awards

Phishing take-down paper wins 'Best Paper Award' at APWG eCrime Researcher's Summit

Richard Clayton and I have been tracking phishing sites for some time. Back in May, we reported on how quickly phishing websites are removed. Subsequently, we have also compared the performance of banks in removing websites and found evidence that ISPs and registrars are initially slow to remove malicious websites.

We have published our updated results at eCrime 2007, sponsored by the Anti-Phishing Working Group. The paper, ‘Examining the Impact of Website Take-down on Phishing’ (slides here), was selected for the ‘Best Paper Award’.

A high-level abridged description of this work also appeared in the September issue of Infosecurity Magazine.

Chip-and-PIN relay attack paper wins "Best Student Paper" at USENIX Security 2007

In May 2007, Saar Drimer and Steven Murdoch posted about “Distance bounding against smartcard relay attacks”. Today their paper won the “Best Student Paper” award at USENIX Security 2007 and their slides are now online. You can read more about this work on the Security Group’s banking security web page.

Steven and Saar at USENIX Security 2007

Shishir wins BCS best student award

Security group member Shishir Nagaraja has won the BCS best PhD student award for his paper The topology of covert conflict. The judges remarked that “the work made an important contribution to traffic analysis in an area that had been previously overlooked; the authors used realistic models with clear results and exciting directions for future research.”

Award winners

Congratulations to Steven J. Murdoch and George Danezis who were recently awarded the Computer Laboratory Lab Ring (the local alumni association) award for the “most notable publication” (that’s notable as in jolly good) for the past year, written by anyone in the whole lab.

Their paper, “Low cost traffic analysis of Tor”, was presented at the 2005 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland 2005). It demonstrates a feasible attack, within the designer’s threat model, on the anonymity provided by Tor, the second generation onion routing system.

George was recently back in Cambridge for a couple of days (he’s currently a post-doc visiting fellow at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven) so we took a photo to commemorate the event (see below). As it happens, Steven will be leaving us for a while as well, to work as an intern at Microsoft Research for a few months… one is reminded of the old joke about the Scotsman coming south of the border and thereby increasing the average intelligence of both countries 🙂

George Danezis and Steven J. Murdoch, most notable publication 2006
George Danezis and Steven J. Murdoch, most notable publication 2006