Joan Feigenbaum Paper Wins "Test of Time" Award

Joan Feigenbaum, the Grace Murray Hopper Professor of Computer Science, has received the Test of Time Award for 1995 – 2006 at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy.  

Based on the idea that it’s impossible to know how important a paper is at the time of its publication, the award recognizes works that have since had an outsized influence on the field. Feigenbaum won for the paper  “Decentralized Trust Management,” a paper published in 1996 that she co-authored with Matt Blaze and Jack Lacy. 

At the time of its publication, the authors described their work as one that “presents a comprehensive approach to trust management, based on a simple language for specifying trusted actions and trust relationships. It also describes a prototype implementation of a new trust management system, called PolicyMaker, that will facilitate the development of security features in a wide range of network services.”

The awards were presented last week via video by David Evans, professor of computer science at the University of Virginia and chair of the Test of Time awards committee. He noted that the criteria for the awards were: 

• A major impact on the research community and having been deployed in widely used and important systems. 

• Papers that initiated major new research directions and led to new work and even entire new research fields that otherwise would not have emerged.

• Papers that anyone in the field “should read and learn about today.”