Fredrikson Receives Test of Time Award
By Adam Kohlhaas
Carnegie Mellon University's Matt Fredrikson has received the 2025 ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) Test-of-Time Award, honoring research with enduring impact in computer and communications security.
Fredrikson, an associate professor in the School of Computer Science's Computer Science Department and the Software and Societal Systems Department, was recognized along with Somesh Jha of the University of Wisconsin and Thomas Ristenpart of Cornell University for their paper, "Model Inversion Attacks That Exploit Confidence Information and Basic Countermeasures." The work, originally published a decade ago, introduced a new class of privacy attacks that demonstrated how adversaries could infer sensitive personal information, such as genomic data or facial images, by probing a machine learning model's confidence scores.
The paper's findings revealed critical vulnerabilities in systems that deploy machine learning for privacy-sensitive applications, including medical diagnosis, behavioral prediction and facial recognition. The researchers also explored countermeasures to reduce exposure while maintaining model utility, offering early guidance that continues to influence privacy and security research today.
The award was presented earlier this month at ACM CCS 2025 in Taipei, Taiwan.
For more information, visit the ACM CCS website.