Brendan Saltaformaggio received the 2017 ACM SIGSAC Doctoral Dissertation Award at the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (ACM CCS), which was held October 30-November 3 in Dallas, Texas. SIGSAC is the Special Interest Group on Security, Audit, and Control in the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).

An assistant professor at the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), Saltaformaggio was recognized for his Ph.D. dissertation, “Convicted by Memory: Automatically Recovering Spatial-Temporal Evidence from Memory Images.” He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Purdue University in 2016.

Saltaformaggio’s dissertation pioneered new cyber forensic techniques that help investigators solve crimes. Much of his work focused on memory image forensics, a key area in cyber forensics that involves recovering digital evidence from memory (RAM) images captured from the criminal or victim's device such as a PC or smartphone.

Saltaformaggio’s dissertation challenged the state-of-the-art of memory forensics by breaking away from brute force data-carving approaches. Instead, his research developed a series of binary-analysis-driven techniques that automatically reconstruct and render in-memory forensic evidence, even if a suspect has locked or encrypted their device.

A member of the ECE faculty since this past July, Saltaformaggio leads the Cyber Forensics Innovation (CyFI) Laboratory. The CyFI Lab's mission is to further the investigation of advanced cyber crimes and the analysis and prevention of next-generation malware attacks, particularly in mobile and IoT environments. He is also a member of Georgia Tech’s Institute for Information Security & Privacy.