The focus of this habilitation thesis is on secure computation, an area of cryptography that lets multiple parties distributively compute a function on their private data. After providing a high-level introduction to my work in cryptography, the manuscript provides a gentle introduction to secret-sharing-based secure computation, which is aimed at a general audience. Then, the last chapter covers some of my contributions to secure computation through the introduction and construction of pseudorandom correlation generators (PCG), a cryptographic primitive that enables considerable efficiency improvements for a wide variety of secure computation protocols. I provide a step-by-step introduction to the notion of PCG and its security properties, outline the challenges in building them, and present a general framework for constructing PCGs. The chapter also contains extensive efficiency considerations and covers various optimizations, as well as extensions and generalizations of the notion of PCGs. Altogether, this provides a unified introduction to the work on pseudorandom correlation generators developed in my work over the past five years, aimed at a broad cryptography audience.

Jury:
Michel Abdalla, reviewer, DR CNRS at ENS Paris
Benny Applebaum, reviewer, professor at Tel-Aviv University
Ivan Damgård, examiner, professor at Aarhus University
Carmit Hazay, reviewer, professor at Bar-Ilan University
Sophie Laplante, examiner, professor at Université Paris-Cité