15 December 2025
"Paranoid Android" awarded the Test of Time Award at the (ACSAC) in Hawaii.
15 years ago, Herbert Bos, along with a few researchers, published "Paranoid Android". By recording the execution trace of the programs running on a smartphone and replaying it on a big server in the cloud, they could apply heavy-weight security checks to detect intrusion attempts. Herbert Bos can still remember what a pain it was to get the unfortunate thing to work. It felt like the project was cursed. For those who remember: these were the days of the HTC G1 phones.
Today, "Paranoid Android" was awarded the Test of Time Award at the Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC) in Hawaii.
Names of other co-authors: Georgios Portokalidis, Kostas Anagnostakis and Philip Homburg.