Announcing the Google Security and Privacy Research Awards

Posted by Elie Bursztein and Oxana Comanescu, Google Security and Privacy Group

We believe that cutting-edge research plays a key role in advancing the security and privacy of users across the Internet. While we do significant in-house research and engineering to protect users’ data, we maintain strong ties with academic institutions worldwide. We provide seed funding through faculty research grants, cloud credits to unlock new experiments, and foster active collaborations, including working with visiting scholars and research interns.

To accelerate the next generation of security and privacy breakthroughs, we recently created the Google Security and Privacy Research Awards program. These awards, selected via internal Google nominations and voting, recognize academic researchers who have made recent, significant contributions to the field.

We’ve been developing this program for several years. It began as a pilot when we awarded researchers for their work in 2016, and we expanded it more broadly for work from 2017. So far, we awarded $1 million dollars to 12 scholars. We are preparing the shortlist for 2018 nominees and will announce the winners next year. In the meantime, we wanted to highlight the previous award winners and the influence they’ve had on the field.
2017 Awardees

Lujo Bauer, Carnegie Mellon University
Research area: Password security and attacks against facial recognition

Dan Boneh, Stanford University
Research area: Enclave security and post-quantum cryptography

Aleksandra Korolova, University of Southern California
Research area: Differential privacy

Daniela Oliveira, University of Florida
Research area: Social engineering and phishing

Franziska Roesner, University of Washington
Research area: Usable security for augmented reality and at-risk populations

Matthew Smith, Universität Bonn
Research area: Usable security for developers


2016 Awardees

Michael Bailey, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Research area: Cloud and network security

Nicolas Christin, Carnegie Mellon University
Research area: Authentication and cybercrime

Damon McCoy, New York University
Research area: DDoS services and cybercrime

Stefan Savage, University of California San Diego
Research area: Network security and cybercrime

Marc Stevens, Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica
Research area: Cryptanalysis and lattice cryptography

Giovanni Vigna, University of California Santa Barbara
Research area: Malware detection and cybercrime


Congratulations to all of our award winners.