XiaoFeng Wang, whose ground-breaking research in systems security and privacy for the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering has generated world-wide benefits for decades, has been named an Association for Computing Machinery Fellow.
The prestigious honor reflects Wang’s transformative contributions to computer science and technology, particularly in system vulnerability analysis, side-channel privacy and protection of human genomic data.
He’s at the forefront of analyzing side-channel leaks in various computing systems from Linux to Android/iOS and, more recently, to Trusted Execution Environments provided by hardware manufacturers such as Intel.
“I am honored to be named ACM Fellow,” Wang said. “In the past two decades,working with my students, we have continuously identified critical security weaknesses in various real-world systems, from web applications toonline payment to mobile computing platforms (Android and iOS), to IoT systems.”
Wang was one of 68 Fellows named for 2023. Fellows are selected by their peers for groundbreaking innovations that improve how people live, work and play. They represent universities, corporations and research centers in the U.S., Japan, the United Kingdom, Israel, India, Germany, Singapore and Canada. Their fields range from cybersecurity, algorithm design, computer graphics, energy-efficient computing, mobile computing, software analytics and web search.
“This recognition acknowledges Dr. Wang's outstanding contributions to the field of computing, with a particular focus on systems security, data privacy, and more recently distributed confidential computing,” said Yuzhen Ye, Computer Science chair and professor of Informatics and Computer Science. “This achievement is truly well-deserved.”
ACM, which has nearly 110,000 members world-wide, is the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society. It unites computing educators, researchers and professionals to inspire dialogue, share resources and address computing challenges.
The ACM Fellows program recognizes exceptional contributions from computing field leaders, whose accomplishments rank in the top one percent of ACM members. They help enlighten researchers, developers, practitioners and end users of information technology throughout the world.
“This year’s inductees include the inventor of the World Wide Web (Tim Berners-Lee), the ‘godfathers of AI and other colleagues whose contributions represent important building blocks in forming the digital society that shapes our modern world,” said ACM President Yannis Ioannidis in a release.
Wang’s achievements during his 20 years at Indiana University, done in conjunction with colleagues, students and postdoctoral fellows, have positioned IU and the Luddy School as a globally recognized hub for cybersecurity innovations.
Their research has led to significant changes in computing systems such as the redesign of OS X keychain, enhanced protection of iOS and Android kernels, improved security for Single-Sign on systems and Cashier-as-a-Service systems, and elevated security control on UNIX-like system’s process file systems.
Wang’s collaboration with Haixu Tang, Luddy professor of Informatics and Computing, starting in 2008, enabled them to become one of the world’s first groups to investigate privacy implications of sharing and analyzing human genomic data.
“We show that even statistical results as published by biomedical research papers could be used to re-identify patients,” Wang said.“We studied when aggregated patient data can be safely released and when they can’t.”
Their research informed National Institute of Health discussions on how to balance the utility of data to biomedical research and protection of patient privacy.
With collaborators, they organized the iDASH Genome Privacy competition, which over the last 10 years has become a benchmark for advances in cybersecurity technologies, particularly their applications to protect biomedical data.
More recently, their research has led to a $9 million National Science Foundation Frontiers Award to establish the Center for Distributed Confidential Computing at the Luddy School. That’s the NSF’s largest investment in data-in-use protection, including protection of patient data in biomedical computing.
One thing is certain -- Wang isn’t done yet.
“With the recruitment of new faculty and continued support from the Luddy School,” he said, “I am confident that Luddy cybersecurity and other research will gain greater prominence.
“The best is certainly yet to come.”