Alina Oprea, a Romanian digital security expert, has won an award from Google together with six other researchers for their work to improve online security and privacy.
Google announced the winners of the 2019 Security and Privacy research awards, which recognizes academics who have made major contributions to the field with their research projects, according to VentureBeat.
Full list of winners:
- Alina Oprea, Northeastern University: Cloud Security
- Matthew Green, Johns Hopkins: Cryptography
- Thorsten Holz, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Systems Security
- Alastair Beresford, Cambridge : Usable security and privacy, mobile security
- Carmela Troncoso, École Polytechnique Usable de Lausanne: Privacy / Security ML
- Rick Wash, Michigan State University: Usable Privacy and Security
- Prateek Saxena, National University of Singapore: ML / Web security
On behalf of the winners, Google will make a financial contribution to their respective universities that totals more than USD 500,000.
Last year, the company paid out more than USD 3.4 million as part of a bug bounty programme for people who discover various security bugs in its software – 1,319 individual payments were handed out to 317 researchers in 78 countries. The largest payment totaled USD 41,000.
Since the launch of the bug bounty programme in 2010, Google has paid out over USD 15 million.