Since the beginning of the project funding period, a great deal of progress has been made, including recruiting a team, performing cutting-edge research, and disseminating research results to the broader international research community.
The research team includes PhD students Pierre Meyer (MSc ENS Lyon) and Matan Hamilis (MSc Technion Israel), postdoctoral research fellows Dr. Cecilia Boschini (PhD University of Lugano) and soon-to-be-arriving Dr. Jack Doerner (PhD Northeastern University), graduate students Dor Banon and Yaxin Tu, as well as regular visiting students and scientists. (We note that an additional postdoc (Mark Simkin, PhD Aarhus University Denmark) and student (Tamalika Mukerjee, Purdue USA) were originally scheduled to arrive in 2020 but were ultimately unable to join the team due to global travel shutdowns of COVID-19 in the relevant time period.)
Within the first 30 months, the Project HSS team has successfully achieved significant research advancements toward the designated project goals. This includes new techniques for building HSS and the important primitive of Pseudorandom Correlation Generators (PCGs), for achieving secure computation with low communication complexity costs, for attaining security against strong malicious adversaries with low overhead, as well as beginning an exploration of connections of HSS to certain types of algorithms design.
Dissemination of project advancements has taken place via team presentations and participation in both local and international conferences, workshops, visits, and other events. This includes several events of the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR), such as annual flagship CRYPTO and EUROCRYPT conferences, the IACR Theory of Cryptography and Asiacrypt Conferences, and broader theory conferences such as FOCS and ITCS. It also includes workshop and school events such as the annual FOCS 2021 Workshop on Cryptography, the Women in Security and Cryptography 2021 workshop, the Bar-Ilan Winter School 2022, Women in Theory 2022 workshop, and the 2022 Simons Institute Workshop on Quantum and Lattices, as well as invited presentations at various university seminars.