CCC Council Member Ben Zorn and his co-author Emery Berger were recently honored with the Most Influential PLDI Paper Award by ACM SIGPLAN for their 2006 paper DieHard: probabilistic memory safety for unsafe languages.

SIGPLAN is a Special Interest Group of ACM that focuses on Programming Languages. In particular, SIGPLAN explores the design, implementation, theory, and efficient use of programming languages and associated tools. The Most Influential PLDI Paper Award is presented annually to the author(s) of a paper presented at the PLDI held 10 years prior to the award year. The award includes a prize of $1,000 to be split among the authors of the winning paper. The papers are judged by their influence over the past decade.

Zorn and Berger’s paper,with contributions from Ted Hart, MSR, presents the titular DieHard, a runtime system that tolerates errors, such as buffer overflows, dangling pointers, and reads of uninitialized data, that can lead to program crashes, security vulnerabilities, and unpredictable behavior while probabilistically maintaining soundness. They analytical and experimental results that show DieHard’s resilience to a wide range of memory errors, including a heap-based buffer overflow in an actual application.

Congratulations to both Ben and Emery on their amazing accomplishment. To learn more about the Most Influential PLDI Paper Award and to see past winners, visit the website.