Associate Professor Toby Murray joint-winner of 2022 ACM Software System Award

Associate Professor Toby Murray, from the School of Computing and Information Systems, is a joint winner of the 2022 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Software System Award.

This marks the first time the ACM Software System Award has been awarded to an Australian-based team. The award was given in recognition of the development of seL4, the first industrial-strength, high-performance operating system with a complete, mechanically-checked proof of full functional correctness.

The seL4 project represents two decades of sustained world-leading research. Since its original publication in 2009, the seL4 kernel has set the bar for how secure systems should be engineered, while demolishing long-held beliefs about the limits of what formal methods can achieve, demonstrating that system security need not come at the cost of performance.

The ACM Software System Award recognises institutions or individuals for developing a software system that has had a lasting influence, reflected in contributions to concepts, commercial acceptance, or both. It carries a prize of $35,000 and is financially supported by the International Business Machines Corporation (IBM).

Associate Professor Murray shares the award with Professor Gernot Heiser, and Associate Professor Kevin Elphinstone University of New South Wales; Professor Gerwin Klein, Google; Professor June Andronick, Proofcraft; Dr David Cock, ETH Zurich; Philip Derrin, Qualcomm; Dr Dhammika Elkaduwe, University of Peradeniya; Dr Kai Engelhardt; Professor Rafal Kolanski, Proofcraft; Associate Professor Michael Norrish, Australian National University; Dr Thomas Sewell, University of Cambridge; and Simon Winwood, Galois.