Abstract: Garbled circuits are a foundational cryptographic primitive that enable secure evaluation of Boolean circuits. Informally, a garbled circuit is an encrypted representation of a circuit, constructed in such a way that, given specific keys encoding an input, one can compute the corresponding output keys—without learning anything about the underlying inputs or intermediate computations. This property makes garbled circuits a powerful tool for secure computation. Originally introduced by Andrew Yao in 1986, they continue to serve as a central technique in the design of secure multi-party protocols. In this class, I will provide an introduction to secure computation and walk through the complete construction of Yao's garbled circuits from first principles. The only prerequisite is familiarity with basic computer science concepts, particularly Boolean circuits.

About the Speaker: Varun Narayanan is a postdoctoral researcher in the Computer Science department at UCLA, hosted by Prof. Rafail Ostrovsky. He previously held a postdoctoral position at Technion, working with Prof. Yuval Ishai and Prof. Eyal Kushilevitz. He earned his PhD from TIFR, Mumbai, advised by Dr. Vinod Prabhakaran. Varun’s research focuses on theoretical and practical aspects of cryptography, with an emphasis on secure multiparty computation.

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