The 2020 ETAPS Test of Time Award went to Geoffrey Smith for his FoSSaCS 2009 paper
On the Foundations of Quantitative Information Flow [doi link].
Papers published in any of the constituent ETAPS conferences between 1998 and 2010 were eligible. The award citation reads as follows:
Smith’s paper represents a cornerstone in the field of Secure Information Flow. Before this paper, the community widely relied on Shannon Entropy to represent the (lack of) knowledge of the adversary about the secret. In his paper Smith showed, in his lucid and crystal-clear style, that a realistic notion of adversary with limited attack opportunities is more suitably modeled by Rényi min-entropy. The message, in its simplicity and the evidence of the arguments, completely convinced the community. The paper became the starting point of a systematic study of entropies and vulnerabilities for quantitative information flow, and has had a deep influence on the field–for instance in the work of Mario Alvim, Gilles Barthe, Michele Boreale, Kostas Chatzikokolakis, Yusuke Kawamoto, Boris Köpf, Annabelle McIver, Carroll Morgan, Catuscia Palamidessi and Tachio Terauchi. Indeed it is fair to say that it caused a shift in the community; most of the subsequent works on quantitative information flow in this area have adopted the new model, and the paper is highly cited.
The paper was also the starting point of the so-called g-leakage framework, which is on the cutting edge of the research on Quantitative Information Flow. In a sense, the g-leakage approach is the natural evolution of the min-entropy approach.
“I am humbled and a bit amazed by this award. I am glad that my paper has been found useful by so many people—I did try to make it as clear as possible, centering its argument on a number of small and compelling examples.”
Professor Smith