Anwar Hithnawi

Anwar Hithnawi is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, where he leads the Privacy Preserving Systems Lab (PPS Lab). His research focuses on data privacy, applied cryptography, and secure systems, with emphasis on privacy-preserving machine learning, federated learning, and encrypted data processing. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from ETH Zurich and was a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley. Previously, he served as an Ambizione Fellow and research group leader at ETH Zurich.

Research Interests:

• Data Privacy & Security
• Applied Cryptography (Homomorphic Encryption, Zero-Knowledge Proofs)
• Privacy-Preserving Systems (Federated Learning, Secure Analytics)
• IoT Security & Privacy
• Secure Collaborative Learning

Awards:

• Google Research Award
• SNF Ambizione Grant
• ETH Medal for Outstanding Master Thesis (student Lukas Burkhalter)
• Microsoft Research Ph.D. Award (student Lukas Burkhalter)

Lab Activities: The PPS Lab develops systems for privacy-preserving computation, secure collaborative learning, and encrypted data stream processing. Notable projects include Zeph, HECO, and Cohere. Recent achievements include acceptance of DPolicy at IEEE S&P 2025 and RoFL at Oakland 2023.