Posted: 16th February 2017

We are very proud that Ivan and Cas have been recognised with MPLS Impact Awards. The MPLS Impact Awards aim to foster and raise awareness of impact by rewarding it at a local level. The Award Ceremony took part at a Winter Party, at which Professor Alex Rogers was one of the invited speakers.

Ivan won a category 1 award that recognises ‘research that has had substantial impact since 1st August 2013’. He was nominated for his research into the security and privacy aspects of the communications technologies used in air traffic control and surveillance in civil aviation. His research has shown that even the newest GPS-based systems used for aircraft tracking are vulnerable to attack. This research has received international recognition with Singapore, Sweden, and the Netherlands using his work to address cyber threats.

Cas was given a Category 2 award, which recognises ‘excellence in generating broad user interactions that achieved impact in the past year’. He was nominated for his recent work on the Transport Layer Security Protocol (TLS), which has led to significant improvements in the next generation of internet security. The TLS protocol is the main technical security mechanism of the internet, and is the technology behind the green lock seen in browsers, providing communication security for computer networks. Additionally, TLS is implemented in all computers, smartphones, and nearly all Internet of Things (IoT) devices, to secure their communications over the internet. A new version of TLS (1.3) will be released in 2017, and will be implemented in millions of devices; Cremers’ work will hugely impact the security of all of our devices in the coming years, and will benefit millions of users worldwide.