Computer Science Professors Diogo Barradas and Urs Hengartner have won the Best Research Paper Award at the 20th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security (ARES), held in Ghent, Belgium, from August 10 to 13, 2025.
ARES is one of the most reputable conferences in IT security and privacy. For the past 20 years, it has focused on rigorous and novel research in the field of dependability, computer and information security.
This year, ARES recognized Professors Barradas and Hengartner, alongside Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering Professor Yue Hu, and computer engineering undergraduate student Cheng Tang, for their paper, On the Feasibility of Fingerprinting Collaborative Robot Network Traffic. Professors Barradas, Hengartner, and Hu are also faculty members of the University of Waterloo’s Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute.
A group of Waterloo cybersecurity researchers (left to right) — Professor Urs Hengartner, Cheng Tang, Professor Diogo Barradas, and Professor Yue Hu — investigated privacy risks in collaborative robots.
“Winning a best-paper award as an undergraduate student, like Cheng, is outstanding. It shows once again how strong our undergraduates are,” says Professor Hengartner.
This study focuses on privacy weaknesses in robotics, which have gained widespread usage in various sectors like healthcare and manufacturing in recent years. The team investigated whether traffic analysis techniques could predict a robot’s actions.
Ultimately, the researchers have found that attackers could identify these actions with a 97 per cent accuracy rate — calling for stronger security defenses.
To learn more about this research, please read the full article on Waterloo News.