The project aims to study secure computation techniques and building blocks that enhance privacy-preserving machine learning.

This project aims to study oblivious RAM - a primitive that allows hiding the access pattern of a RAM program that has applications in cloud computing and in secure computation. The project tackles fundamental aspects such as parallelization, amortization, stronger security notions, practical constructions, and secure computation in the RAM model.

Differential privacy offers a rigorous mathematical definition of privacy, immune to post-processing and composition. This proposal is centered around two venues: The first venue deals with the trust-free local-model of differential privacy, in which computations do not involve a curator (a central, trusted authority), but rather are done using protocols in which each agent adds noise to her own message thus preserving privacy by herself. Recent works have shown that augmenting the local-model with certain primitives, such as a random shuffle of users’ messages or the addition of a trusted curator with access to the details of few individuals, allow for new capabilities and better privacy-accuracy trade-offs than standard local-model protocols. Thus, we propose the study of augmentations of the local-model with trusted primitives that allow for better privacy-accuracy trade-offs. The second venue deals with the study of three specific subfields in Machine Learning and Statistics where we believe the study of differentially private algorithms is lacking. We aim to design differentially-private algorithms for various tasks in clustering, reinforcement learning and hypothesis testing with optimal privacy-accuracy trade-offs. Note that since almost all analyses in medicine, econometrics and quantitative social sciences rely on hypothesis-testing, the design of differentially private hypothesis testers is pivotal for the spread of differential privacy into such data-centric fields. The grant award is 920,000 NIS.

The focus of the project is very powerful, yet highly theoretical, MPC-in-the-head technique that already demonstrated broad applicability and great impact on MPC in the case of both honest and dishonest majority. The grant award was 880,000  NIS.

  Cryptanalysis studies the practical security of the encryption schemes we use. This project concerns cryptanalysis of resource constrained (so-called, 'lightweight') encryption schemes, deployed in most Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices. Our motivation is that in order to address the challenge of lightweight cryptography, it is not sufficient to adjust the current designs and analysis to the constrained environment. Instead, we must establish a new research methodology, aiming directly at the problems arising in the 'lightweight realm'.   We plan to concentrate on four main directions. First, in order to enable conceptually new designs, we will study the security of the generic schemes serving as building blocks of most ciphers. Second, considering specific ciphers we will pursue low complexity cryptanalysis, being more relevant to the lightweight realm than 'standard' attacks. Third, we will pursue new directions toward establishing 'white-box cryptography'. Finally, we will explore further applications of discrete analysis to lightweight cryptography.   The project began in October 2017 and will run until September 2022. The grant award was approximately 1,500,000 Euros.    

The focus of the project is to investigate the commercial viability of results of Lindell’s ERC starting grant LAST, and will run for approximately 18 months starting November 2014. The grant award was approximately 150,000 Euros.

In this research project, we study how to further utilize hardware in cryptography and cryptographic protocols. In addition, we study how “trusted computing environments”, like the new Intel SGX trusted computing architecture, can be utilized. The overall budget of the project is approximately 1,160,000  NIS.

The focus of the project is taking a fresh look at fundamental theoretical questions related to secure computation. Questions like fairness in the case of no honest majority, completeness of protocols, etc., are included in this project. The grant award was 748,800 NIS.

A key aspect of the project is to compare, contrast and build upon the differing expertise in the University of  Bristol and Bar-Ilan University by combining and comparing the state-of-the-art in both secret sharing and Yao based protocols. The project is a joint Israel-UK research project by the Israel Ministry of Science. The project began in January 2015 and will run for 3 years. Our portion of the budget is approximately 1,275,000 NIS.

The focus of the project is the development of cryptographic infrastructure for online privacy. This included secure computation protocols, protocols for anonymity, and more. The project began in 2009 and will run until 2014. LAST is an acronym of "Large Scale Privacy-Preserving Technology in the Digital World: Infrastructure and Applications". The grant award was approximately 1,900,000 Euros.

The focus of the project is the development of highly efficient protocols for secure computation. Research in the project will combine knowledge in cryptography and algorithms, as well as systems considerations regarding implementations. The project began in October 2014 and will run until September 2019. HIPS is an acronym of "High-Performance Secure Computation with Privacy and Cloud Security". The grant award was approximately 2,000,000 Euros.

The focus of the project is the development of efficient two-party and multiparty protocols. The project began in 2008 and will run until 2013. SFEROT is an acronym of "Secure Function Evaluation from Theory to Tools".

There currently exist no satisfactory approaches to protect data during computation from cloud providers and from other users of the cloud. PRACTICE is a consortium research project that will aim to provide privacy and confidentiality for computations in the cloud. PRACTICE will create a secure cloud framework that allows the realization of advanced and practical cryptographic technologies providing sophisticated security and privacy guarantees for all parties in cloud-computing scenarios. The project began in November 2013 and will run for 3 years. The overall budget of the project is approximately 7,500,000 Euros, and our portion of the budget is approximately 700,000 Euros.

The focus of the project was to bridge theory and practice in secure computation. The project considered relaxed definitions for secure computation that would be amenable to more efficient protocols, new protocol constructions, and more. The grant award was 548,000 NIS.

The project ran from 2005 to 2009 and the project's co-PI was Prof. Jonathan Katz from the University of Maryland. The portion awarded to Yehuda Lindell was $60,000.

The project ran from 2005 to 2008 and involved teams from data mining, algorithms, privacy law and cryptography. The overall budget was 1,911,484 NIS, and the portion awarded to Yehuda Lindell was 254,700 NIS.