[JdeBP]

Would research into side-channel attacks count under M. Pike's criteria?

Granted, whilst it is system-level it is not system software. And it has not yielded demos that people have regarded as cool, rather ones that have been received by some as horrifyingly worrying.

But it has definitely influenced industry.

[tlb]

Great work has been done discovering side-channel attacks, but on the other hand most side channels have been created by sloppy microarchitectural design since 2000. So I dunno if that's progress. If we see some CPUs in the next few years that are both fast and not vulnerable, I'll count that as progress.