In 2016, Boneh was elected a member of the
National Academy of Engineering for contributions to the theory and practice of cryptography and computer security.
In 2018, Boneh became co-director (with David Mazières) of the newly founded Center for Blockchain Research at Stanford, predicting at the time that "
Blockchains will become increasingly critical to doing business globally."[11] Dr. Boneh is also known for putting his entire introductory cryptography course online for free.[12] The course is also available via Coursera.[13]
Boneh's primary research focuses is on the area of cryptography where he has worked in numerous areas.
Identity-Based Encryption
In 1984
Adi Shamir proposed the possibility of
identity-based encryption (IBE), which allows people to send encrypted messages to each other by using a public key derived from the recipients identity. Boneh, with
Matt Franklin, proposed one of the first identity-based encryption schemes based on the
Weil pairing. The
Boneh-Franklin scheme remains an active area of research. In 2010 Boneh (with Shweta Agrawal and Xavier Boyen) introduced an IBE scheme from the
learning with errors assumption.[22]
Homomorphic Encryption
A
homomorphic encryption algorithm is one where a user can perform computation on encrypted data, without decrypting it. Boneh's has developed several improvements of homomorphic cryptosystems. For example, with Eu-Jin Goh and Kobbi Nissim in 2005 Boneh proposed a "partially homomorphic cryptosystem".[23]
Timing attacks
Timing attacks are a type of
side-channel attack that allows an adversary to attack a security system by studying now long it takes to perform certain calculations. In 2003, Boneh (with
David Brumley) proposed one of the first practical timing attacks on
OpenSSL that worked over the Internet. He then later showed how to extend the attack, "show[ing] that the time web sites take to respond to HTTP requests can leak private information."[24]
Other significant work
Some of Boneh's other results in cryptography and computer security include: