Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Professor Endadul Hoque and Ph.D Student Polina Kozyreva Receive Best Paper Award at the International Workshop on Search-Based and Fuzz Testing 

Polina Kozyreva and Endadul Hoque
Polina Kozyreva and Endadul Hoque

Assistant Professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Endadul Hoque, and Ph.D. student, Polina Kozyreva, have received the Best Paper Award at the International Workshop on Search-Based and Fuzz Testing (SBFT 2025). They received the award for their paper, “On Evaluating Fuzzers with Context-Sensitive Fuzzed Inputs: A Case Study on PKCS#1-v1.5.” 

Fuzz testing is an automated software testing technique where you input random or invalid data into a program to identify bugs and vulnerabilities.

SBFT is a two-day workshop that includes a research track, keynote presentations, and testing tool competitions. The primary goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers and industry practitioners from the fields of software-based testing, fuzzing, and the broader software engineering community to share their experiences and discuss future research focused on automating software testing. Additionally, the workshop promotes the integration of search and fuzzing techniques with other areas of software engineering. 

The SBFT 2025 workshop was held in Ottawa, Canada, and co-located with the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)/Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2025), a top-tier software engineering conference. Kozyreva presented their paper and received the award on behalf of the team.  

“I am extremely honored to receive the Best Paper Award, especially as this was the first paper I had the pleasure of working on with my advisor and presenting in front of leading experts who inspire me to grow and strive to become a contributor to the field—someone whose work benefits the community,” Kozyreva says.  

“It’s incredibly rewarding to see this work with Polina win the Best Paper Award at such a prestigious workshop. As a first-year PhD student, she not only worked on the paper but also presented it herself and did a fantastic job. Achieving a best paper award so early in her PhD is a remarkable milestone and a strong boost as she continues the follow-up project. She’s shown both tremendous potential and tenacity—I’m excited to see where she takes her research next,” says Hoque.