Dr. Jiska Classen
Dr. Jiska Classen (newly minted PhD) has absolutely been crushing it over the past year cranking out new Bluetooth vulnerabilities and exploit research frameworks. This nomination is not just for a single publication, but all of the research that Dr. Classen and her students have produced on Bluetooth over the past year (full list at Dr. Classen’s CV page above). This started with her InternalBlue work (fully reversing Broadcom Bluetooth firmware in order to use the firmware stack directly as a research platform), and has continued with Bluetooth-WiFi exploitation (Spectra) and working her way into MacOS (ToothPicker) and iOS. In the past year InternalBlue has become so advanced that the entire Broadcom firmware can be fully executed in an emulator (Frankenstein) pushing the bounds of chipset-level RE and chipset-level vulnerability identification. Her work on Spectra was presented at BlackHat 2020.