Winners 2025

The Applied Research Competition sources papers from the top security, privacy, and usability conferences, and asks a panel of judges from industry and academia to pick the best papers in terms of social and technical impacts. This year, a total of 189 papers were submitted to the competition. A panel of 27 program committee members nominated 11 finalists in October. On Nov 7, the 11 finalists presented their work as posters in front of a panel of judges in person at NYU. The judges ranked the finalists in terms of social and technical impacts. Here are the results:

🥈 Runner-up in Social Impact

Between Court Orders and Platform Policies: Understanding Law Enforcement and Meta Interactions in Addressing Non-Consensual Image Disclosure Abuse
Published in Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security, SOUPS '25

Presenter: Amna Batool (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor)

🥈 Runner-up in Technical Impact

PATCHAGENT: A Practical Program Repair Agent Mimicking Human Expertise
Published in USENIX Security Symposium '25

Presenter: Zheng Yu (Northwestern University)

🏆 Best Paper in Social Impact

Analyzing the AI Nudification Application Ecosystem
Published in USENIX Security Symposium '25

Presenter: Daniel Olszewski (University of Florida)

🏆 Best Paper in Technical Impact

GPUHammer: Rowhammer Attacks on GPU Memories are Practical
Published in USENIX Security Symposium '25

Presenter: Shaopeng Lin (University of Toronto)

Finalists

Full Name School Paper Title (PDF)
Meira Gilbert University of Washington "TikTok, Do Your Thing": User Reactions to Social Surveillance in the Public Sphere
Mohammad Namvarpour Drexel University AI-induced Sexual Harassment: Investigating Contextual Characteristics and User Reactions of Sexual Harassment by a Companion Chatbot
Daniel Olszewski University of Florida Analyzing the AI Nudification Application Ecosystem
Amna Batool University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI Between Court Orders and Platform Policies: Understanding Law Enforcement and Meta Interactions in Addressing Non-Consensual Image Disclosure Abuse
Maryam Motallebighomi Northeastern University eSIMplicity or eSIMplification? Privacy and Security Risks in the eSIM Ecosystem
Shaopeng Lin University of Toronto, Department of Computer Science GPUHammer: Rowhammer Attacks on GPU Memories are Practical
Zheng Yu Northwestern University PATCHAGENT: A Practical Program Repair Agent Mimicking Human Expertise
Joshua Wiedemeier The University of Texas at Dallas PyLingual: Toward Perfect Decompilation of Evolving High-Level Languages
Junming Chen George Mason University Tracking You from a Thousand Miles Away! Turning a Bluetooth Device into an Apple AirTag Without Root Privileges
Francisca Wijaya Wesleyan University Websites' Global Privacy Control Compliance at Scale and over Time
Peter Whiting University of Waterloo IRBlock: A Large-Scale Measurement Study of the Great Firewall of Iran

Program Committee

Our program committee comprises a mix of industry and academic researchers.