Carnegie Mellon University's Adrian Perrig was awarded a Security 7 Award from Information Security magazine for innovative cybersecurity research in academia.

Perrig, technical director of Carnegie Mellon CyLab, a professor in the departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Engineering and Public Policy, and the School of Computer Science, will be recognized in the magazine's October issue. This is the fifth year of the awards program, which drew more than 150 nominations throughout North America.

"I am deeply honored by this award because it demonstrates the important contributions under way by academic researchers in critical areas of security decision-making and novel technologies designed to protect users from cyber attacks," Perrig said.

Michael S. Mimoso, editor of the Massachusetts-based Information Security magazine, said the awards recognize the achievements of security practitioners and researchers in a variety of industries, including education. "Professor Perrig is being recognized for attacking future threats by designing systems that cut down on user error," said Mimoso, a 2007 fellow at Carnegie Mellon's Information Technology Media Fellowship Program supported by the university's College of Engineering.

Perrig, a 2006 winner of a Sloan Research Fellowship for securing sensor networks, said the most fundamental threat to Web connections is a so-called man-in-the-middle attack, in which an adversary intrudes in a connection between a client and a server to eavesdrop on communication or inject malicious data.

"With our research and education, we provide users with additional information to improve their security decisions. Moreover, in many cases our technologies can completely detect and prevent attacks," Perrig said.

Federal agencies, including the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security, are pouring more funds into hiring computer experts and protecting their networks.

"This award is wonderful recognition of the leading-edge work ongoing at Carnegie Mellon CyLab, one of the largest university-based cybersecurity education and research centers in the U.S.," said Pradeep K. Khosla, dean of Carnegie Mellon's College of Engineering and founding director of CyLab. "Our goal is to build mutually beneficial public-private partnerships to develop new technologies for measurable, available, secure, trustworthy and sustainable computing and communications systems, and to educate individuals at all levels," Khosla said.

Other novel research developed by Perrig includes Perspectives, a Firefox plug-in to protect users from a variety of SSL (Secure Socket Layer) and TLS (Transport Layer Security) attacks, as well as software-based attestation to detect malware, such as worms or viruses on a variety of systems ranging from cell phones to vehicles.

Perrig, who has been at Carnegie Mellon since 2002, has won many awards and honors, including a 2004 Career Award from the National Science Foundation for work on secure and resilient sensor network communication infrastructure. He received IBM faculty fellowships in 2004 and 2005 for security-system research.

Perrig received his bachelor's degree in computer science at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1997, and his master's degree (1999) and Ph.D. (2002) in computer science from Carnegie Mellon.

Read the Information Security article.