Associate Professor Jay Ligatti received the Test of Time Award at the 2015 ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), for the impact of his CCS 2015 paper, "Control Flow Integrity".
Ligatti wrote, "In 2003, when I had the idea to embed IDs in [machine code] jump destinations and detect attacks by checking IDs before jumping, in a technique I called control-flow-integrity (CFI) enforcement, I didn't realize how much attention it would receive. My effort on the project was entirely theoretical, creating the mechanism and proving its soundness for a model machine language. [Coauthors] Úlfar Erlingsson, Martín Abadi, and Mihai Budiu deserve all the credit for making the theoretical design practical, implementing and empirically evaluating the technique, and writing up the descriptions in the original research papers."
As of 2015, Control-Flow Integrity is an active research area, with approximately 50 of the 600 papers submitted to CCS this year being on the topic.
The paper can be accessed here.