The 2013 Pwnie Award For Most Innovative Research

Identifying and Exploiting Windows Kernel Race Conditions via Memory Access Patterns

The research consisted of two major parts: employing CPU-level OS instrumentation to locate potential double fetch vulnerabilities in the kernels of different operating systems, and discovering and testing practical means of exploiting such memory-bound race conditions in practical scenarios. Not only the topic is interesting, but bochspwn was used to find at least 37 vulnerabilities in windows kernel / drivers (plus some minor system crashes).