MT25 Strachey Lecture - Professor Rafail Ostrovsky: Advances in Garbled Circuits

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Advances in Garbled Circuits

Rafail Ostrovsky, UCLA

Nearly 40 years ago, Andy Yao proposed the construction of “Garbled Circuits,” which had an enormous impact on the field of secure computation -- both in theory and in practice. In Garbled Circuits, two parties agree on a Boolean circuit that they want to evaluate, where both parties have partial, disjoint inputs to the circuit, and neither party is willing to disclose to the other party anything but the output.  In this talk, I will survey the state of the art for garbling schemes, including computing with Garbled Random Access Memory, the so-called GRAM constructions that were invented by Lu and Ostrovsky in 2013, as well as more recent progress, including the GRAM paper by Heath, Kolesnikov and Ostrovsky, which received the best paper award in Eurocrypt 2022. I will also discuss Garbled Circuits in the malicious setting, where parties try to deviate arbitrarily from the prescribed protocol execution to gain additional information, and will review some of the latest advances in this area. The talk will be self-contained and accessible to the general audience.

Bio: Dr. Rafail Ostrovsky holds the Norman E. Friedmann Endowed Chair in Knowledge Sciences at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering. He is a Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and Mathematics at UCLA. He was elected as a Fellow by multiple organizations, including the American Academy of Inventors, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR). Prof. Ostrovsky is a foreign member of the Academia Europaea. He has published over 350 peer-reviewed articles and holds 16 patents issued by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). He served as chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Mathematical Foundations of Computing from 2015 to 2018 and as Chair of the IEEE Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS) 2011 Annual Conference Program Committee (PC). He also served on over 40 other international conference PCs and is serving on the editorial boards of the Journal of ACM and the Algorithmica Journal. He also served on the Journal of Cryptology's editorial board from 2006 until 2025. Prof. Ostrovsky is the recipient of multiple awards and honors, including the 1993 Henry Taub Prize; the 2017 IEEE Computer Society Edward J. McCluskey Technical Achievement Award; the 2018 RSA Award for Excellence in Mathematics (also known as RSA Prize); and the 2022 W. Wallace McDowell Award – the highest award given by the IEEE Computer Society.

The Strachey Lectures are generously supported by OxFORD Asset Management