Researchers from CSE were among those honored with a 2022 IEEE Cybersecurity Award for Practice for their work on WebAssembly Sandboxing for Firefox. CSE Department Chair Sorin Lerner and Associate Professor Deian Stefan – along with engineers from Mozilla and researchers from Stanford and the University of Texas at Austin – were recognized for their novel approach to improving memory safety for Firefox. The team addressed one of the open-source web browser’s biggest security challenges by breaking code into multiple sandboxed processes with reduced privileges.

CSE bachelor’s student Arjun Sampath has been awarded a Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Scholarship. The scholarship recognizes students who demonstrate academic excellence and a commitment to their field.

“My work in research labs at UC San Diego, such as SEELab, shows a passion for pursuing computer science past just the academic courses,” said Sampath, who attributes winning the scholarship to his CSE research and community involvement.

Sampath serves as Vice Chair Finance for the UC San Diego branch of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). He is also a CSE tutor and mentors first-year students through the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) student organization.

Earlence Fernandes, a recent addition to CSE, has received an Amazon Research Award for his proposal, “Verifiable Distributed Computation.” For Fernandes, this honor follows closely on the heels of another: a 2022 National Science Foundation CAREER Award for his research on Security and Privacy Foundations of Internet-Scale User-Centered Automation.

Fernandes’ research focuses on computer security from a systems perspective, anticipating security issues in emerging technologies and establishing their security foundations early on. Fernandes joins CSE Assistant Professor Sean Gao as two of 74 researchers to earn the 2022 Amazon Research Award. They are the latest of a half-dozen CSE faculty members honored by Amazon over the past four years.