I work in the areas of cryptography and security and my research focuses on bringing cryptograhic techniques for secure computation closer to practical uses. While secure multiparty computation (SMC) has been an active research field in cryptography for a long time, until recently SMC solutions have been considered unusable from a practical point of view because of their prohibitive efficiency cost.

I believe this perception is gradually starting to change and there have been multiple efforts directed towards implementation of SMC techniques. People engage daily in numerous electronic interactions most of which require as input highly sensitive private information. The unwanted exposure of such information can have various negative consequences, which leads to a growing need for providing security guarantees in these applications. While secure computation is desirable and beneficial in most of these cases, in some scenarios it is a necessary requirement, the recent advent of cloud computing being a compelling example.

In order to adopt secure computation approaches in real application we do need to have solutions with acceptable efficiency characteristics, where the growing computational resources available today should also be taken into consideration when determining the efficiency requirements. My work has been focused on the question of improving the efficiency of SMC solutions for various practical uses. I try to explore a wide range of approaches, which might be appropriate in different scenarios, including construction of secure protocols tailored to specific useful classes of functionalities, exploring new adversarial models that can trade-off efficiency for relaxed, yet well-defined, security notions, looking at new computation models that manage to overcome some inherent inefficiencies in existing SMC approaches.