Jad Silbak

Biographical Details

Jad Silbak was a Simons Postdoctoral Fellow as part of the Simons Institute summer program on cryptography. Prior to that, he was a Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow at Northeastern University’s Khoury College of Computer Sciences in Boston, where he collaborated with Professor Daniel Wichs on research in cryptography. Jad earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Tel Aviv University, where he was advised by Iftach Haitner and Ronen Shaltiel. Before his doctoral studies, he completed both his B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Computer Science at the University of Haifa, under the supervision of Ronen Shaltiel.

Research Interests

Jad Silbak’s research is in theoretical computer science, lying at the intersection of cryptography, differential privacy, and complexity theory. A central theme in his work is understanding how computational restrictions on adversaries enable constructions that are impossible in the information-theoretic setting.

In coding theory, he works on constructing error-correcting codes with improved rates and efficiency against adversarial channels with limited computational power. His work introduced techniques for building such codes based on new notions of computational hardness, including hard-to-sample functions, a stronger variant of average-case hardness. This notion has found several new applications in cryptography and complexity and serves as a key tool in constructing better randomness extractors for efficiently samplable distributions. In the context of differential privacy, his research aims to characterize which cryptographic assumptions are necessary for performing differentially private computations with non-trivial accuracy. His broader research interests include hardness amplification, meta-complexity, and the connections between cryptographic primitives and fundamental questions in computational complexity.

Select Publications

Ball, M., Shaltiel, R., & Silbak, J. (2025). Extractors for Samplable Distributions with Low Min-Entropy. In Proceedings of the 57th Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing.

Silbak, J., & Wichs, D. (2025). Binary Codes for Error Detection and Correction in a Computationally Bounded World. In Annual International Conference on the Theory and Applications of Cryptographic Techniques. Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland.

Shaltiel, R., & Silbak, J. (2024, June). Explicit codes for poly-size circuits and functions that are hard to sample on low entropy distributions. In Proceedings of the 56th Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (pp. 2028-2038).

Haitner, I., Mazor, N., Silbak, J., & Tsfadia, E. (2022, June). On the complexity of two-party differential privacy. In Proceedings of the 54th Annual ACM SIGACT Symposium on Theory of Computing (pp. 1392-1405).