The 2013 Pwnie Award For Most Innovative Research
Identifying and Exploiting Windows Kernel Race Conditions via Memory Access Patterns
Mateusz "j00ru" Jurczyk, Gynvael Coldwind
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).