EEE Computer Society Honors Srinivas Devadas with the ACM/IEEE-CS Eckert-Mauchly Award

LOS ALAMITOS, Calif., 24 June 2026  – The IEEE Computer Society (CS) is pleased to announce the recipient of the 2026 ACM/IEEE-CS Eckert-Mauchly Award: Srinivas Devadas, Webster Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The award celebrates Devadas for pioneering contributions to secure architectures with broad industrial and academic impact.

Devadas developed several ground-breaking secure computing components that are at the heart of industrial products. His pioneering research served as the foundation for trusted execution protocols, hardware attestation, oblivious random access memory (ORAM), and side-channel resistance – collectively safeguarding the data of our modern digital world. Devadas is a pioneer in the field of secure computer architecture whose fundamental contributions – from the invention of Physical Unclonable Functions to the design of secure processor architectures including AEGIS and Sanctum – have had both deep academic influence and broad industrial adoption.

“Srinivas Devadas has had a profound impact on architecture and security, and has been a pioneer in applied cryptography,” said Grace E. Lewis, IEEE CS 2026 President. “We are honored to recognize his significant contributions to both academia and industry, and we thank him for his dedication to this community.”

Devadas, an IEEE Fellow, adds the Eckert-Mauchly Award to a list of notable industry accolades, including Computer Society distinctions. For instance, in 2017, he received the IEEE Computer Society W. Wallace McDowell Award for fundamental contributions that have shaped the field of secure hardware, impacting circuits, microprocessors, and systems. In 2014, Devadas was recognized with the IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award for pioneering work in secure hardware, including the invention of Physical Unclonable Functions and single-chip secure processor architectures.

A highly cited author, Devadas has published more than 300 papers, focusing on the intersection of applied cryptography and computer architecture. His group has been recognized for designing a secure processor called Ascend that allows untrusted programs to compute on encrypted data from a client without leaking information about the data. Additionally, Devadas’ team’s most recent work involves the definition of a new data privacy notion called PAC Privacy, which is dependent on, and exploits, entropy in private data that is processed to produce exposed outputs and can be automatically measured and controlled.

In addition to research achievements, Devadas has long been an advocate for computer science and engineering education. From 2011-2025, he served as the computer science track coordinator of the MIT Program for Research in Mathematics, Engineering and Science (PRIMES) high-school outreach program, a year-long program where high-school students are exposed to research and mentored by MIT students. Devadas is a MacVicar Faculty Fellow and an Everett Moore Baker teaching award recipient, considered MIT's two highest undergraduate teaching honors.

Devadas will be formally presented with the Eckert-Mauchly Award on Tuesday, 30 June, at 12:00 pm EDT at ISCA 2026 in Raleigh, N.C., U.S.

Biographical Background 

Srinivas Devadas is the Webster Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he has been on the faculty since 1988. He received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley (UCB), and was named a Distinguished Alumnus of UCB Electrical Engineering in 2025.

Devadas has worked in the fields of Computer-Aided Design (CAD), computer architecture, computer security, and applied cryptography. His awards include the ACM SIGDA-IEEE CEDA A. Richard Newton Technical Impact award in Electronic Design Automation (2015), the IEEE Circuits and Systems Charles A. Desoer Technical Achievement Award (2018), and the ACM SIGSAC Award for Outstanding Innovation (2021). He is a Fellow of IEEE and ACM.

About the Eckert-Mauchly Award

ACM and the IEEE Computer Society co-sponsor the Eckert-Mauchly Award, which was initiated in 1979. It recognizes contributions to computer and digital systems architecture and comes with a $5,000 prize. The award was named for John Presper Eckert and John William Mauchly, who collaborated on the design and construction of the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC), the pioneering large-scale electronic computing machine, which was completed in 1947.

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