Yehuda Lindell


Yehuda Lindell is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at Bar-Ilan University where he conducts research on cryptography with a focus on the theory of secure computation and its application in practice.

Education and academic positions

Lindell received a BSc and Msc degree in computer science from Bar-Ilan University. He then obtained a PhD in computer science from the Weizmann Institute of Science in 2002. Lindell received a Raviv Fellowship and spent two years at IBM's cryptography research group at the T.J. Watson Research Center. In 2004, he returned to Israel to take up an academic position at Bar-Ilan University. Lindell's work on secure computation was recognized by the award of : an ERC starting grant in 2009 and an ERC consolidators grant in 2014.

Industry experience

Lindell worked from 2004 to 2014 as a permanent cryptographic consultant to Safenet, formally Aladdin. He co-founded the company Unbound Tech, and served as its Chief Scientist from 2014 to 2018. In 2019, he took over the role of CEO of Unbound Tech.

Research

Lindell's main contributions focus on the examination of the Yao garbled circuit construction. His most cited work is a joint paper with Benny Pinkas on
privacy preserving data mining in which the use of secure computation was proposed for performing data mining algorithms; in particular the ID3 algorithm. More recent work has focused on the first proof of security for the basic Yao protocol, on the design of two-party protocols which are secure against active adversaries, and the introduction of the concept of covert adversarial models.
Lindell is also the author of a textbook with Jonathan Katz on modern cryptography. This textbook is utilized in many universities around the world as a standard reference work.

Books