Yehuda Lindell

Yehuda Lindell (born 24 February 1971) 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. Lindell currently leads the cryptography team at Coinbase.

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. Lindell was appointed as an IACR Fellow in 2021.

Industry experience
Lindell worked from 2004 to 2014 as a permanent cryptographic consultant to Safenet, formally Aladdin. He co-founded the company Unbound Security, and served as its Chief Scientist from 2014 to 2018. In early 2019, he took over the role of CEO of Unbound Security, taking leave from Bar-Ilan University. In January 2022, Unbound Security was acquired by Coinbase, and Lindell now leads their cryptography team.

Research
Lindell's main contributions are in the field of secure multiparty computation. Lindell's research initially focused on theoretical feasibility, and in particular in the area of protocol composition. Lindell has carried out extensive research on efficient two-party secure computation via the Yao garbled circuit construction, and on efficient multiparty computation for the multiparty honest-majority setting based on Secret sharing. 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. Lindell provided the first proof of security for the basic Yao protocol, and the first proof of security for the BGW protocol. Lindell has also worked on the design of two-party protocols which are secure against active adversaries,   the introduction of the concept of covert adversarial models, and much more. Lindell won the IBM Pat Goldberg Memorial Best Paper Award in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering and Math in 2006 for his work on the composition of Authenticated Byzantine Agreement, and the best paper award at ACM CCS 2016 for work on high-throughput MPC protocols. In 2021, Lindell published a review article on secure multiparty computation in the Communications of the ACM.

Lindell is also the co-inventor of the AES-GCM-SIV mode of operation for symmetric encryption, standardized by the IETF Crypto Forum Research Group in RFC 8452. He received the best paper award at ACM CCS 2017 for the research paper behind AES-GCM-SIV.

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.