Dalit Naor

Dalit Naor

Dean, School of Computer Science and AI
The Academic College of Tel-Aviv-Yaffo

I’m a computer scientist working on storage systems and cloud. I'm the Dean of the School of Computer Science at the Academic College Tel-Aviv-Yaffo. I joined the college after spending a career at IBM Research as a senior technical staff member and a senior manager, where I worked on Cloud platforms and Storage systems. At IBM Almaden I developed technologies for Content Protection. In my past academic life, I worked on Bioinformatics and combinatorial optimization.

I did my PhD at the University of Californian Davis (with Prof. Dan Gusfield), and a postdoc at Stanford and Tel-Aviv University.

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Research

  • My current research area is Storage Systems, Cloud Storage and infrastructure for BigData. My work has addressed cloud object stores and their origins in object-based storage devices (OSDs), data deduplication and compression, cloud security, and long-term digital preservation. More recently, I have been studying DNA storage from a systems perspective.

  • I am active in the storage-systems research community. I co-chaired USENIX FAST 2023, a leading conference on storage systems, regularly serve on program committees, and am an Associate Editor of ACM Transactions on Storage.

  • My role as Dean of Computer Science has also led me to study workplace perceptions among early- and mid-career computing professionals. This research focuses particularly on gender-based differences in workplace experiences, priorities, retention intentions, and the factors that may prompt employees to leave. Our current work examines how the rapid adoption of AI is disrupting the workplace and reshaping professional roles, expectations, and career prospects.

  • In my Ph.D I worked on combinatorial optimization in the area of minimum cuts in graphs and graph augmentation problems

  • As a postdoc at Stanford University and Tel-Aviv University I applied optimization techniques to problems in bioinformatics, when the area was in its very early days. I characterized the optimal and sub-optimal alignments of DNA sequences and proteins.

  • I worked on a spectrum of security-related technologies, including internet security, content protection, storage security and cloud security. I devised optimization algorithms for the assignment of cryptographic keys to compliant devices; these algorithms form the basis for Content Protection / DRM technology protecting against illegal copying of content.



CPRM/CPPM Content Protection

Background: Back in 1999, distributed on-line services for digital audio have just emerged, and threated to disrupt the media...

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Background: Back in 1999, distributed on-line services for digital audio have just emerged, and threated to disrupt the media entertainment industry , e.g., the story of Napster. In response, Digital Right Management (DRM) technologies have been proposed to address this disruption and avoid copyright infringement.

CPRM/CPPM: At IBM Almaden Research Center we developed and deployed CPRM/CPPM, a technology for Content Protection for Recordable Media and Pre-Recorded Media for DVDs, protecting against illegal copying of content. We devised optimization algorithms for the assignment of cryptographic keys to compliant devices and other media. CPRM/CPPM is shipped today in a few types of media such as ATA drives and Secure Digital cards and is part of Advanced Access Content System (AACS) for HD-DVD and Blu-ray discs.

In a Crypto 2001 paper Revocation and Tracing Schemes for Stateless Receivers, Dalit Naor, Moni Naor, Jeffery Lotspiech, we laid the algorithmic foundation for an improvement over the original method. The technology was covered by patents, and the CPRM spec is published and available as an open specification.

Related Links:

Revocation and Tracing Schemes for Stateless Receivers Open Specifications

Object Storage

Backgroud: Data explosion is a major characteristic of our era. Back in 2003 at the Storage Systems research group at IBM we laid the foundation...

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Backgroud: Data explosion is a major characteristic of our era. Back in 2003 at the Storage Systems research group at IBM we laid the foundation for a new abstraction of storage called OSD (Object-based Storage Device) which, a few years later, evolved into Cloud object stores - the most popular cloud storage service today.

The OSD paradigm and T10 standard: We published many Systems/Storage papers over the past decade on the topic. The two early papers (i) Towards an object store (MSST 2003) and (ii) Object storage: The future building block for storage systems (MSST 2005) envisioned the foundation for the paradigm shift.

OSD was also standadized as an open ANSI standard. The OSD T10 standard “SCSI Object-Based Storage Device Commands (OSD)” was publisehd in 2006.

Related Links:

“SCSI Object-Based Storage Device Commands (OSD)” Cloud object stores The ANSI T10 object-based storage standard and current implementations

Long Term Digital Preservation and DNA Storage

Background: Preserving the growing amounts of societal digital goods such as cultural heritage artefacts, scientific information and historical data is a long-standing and open challenge.....

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Background: Preserving the growing amounts of societal digital goods such as cultural heritage artefacts, scientific information and historical data is a long-standing and open challenge. Preservation means being able to access bits from the media (bit preservation) as well as being able to interpret and extract information from the bits (logical preservation).

In 2007 we developed Preservation DataStores, a new storage paradigm for preservation environments built upon object stores that are aware of preservation needs and processes. It employs operations such as transformation and fixity checking close to the data. It leverages OAIS (Open Archival Information System), an ISO standard reference model designed for the long-term preservation and access of digital information.

DNA-based Storage is an emerging and promising media for long term data retention, characterized by extremely high density and long term durability. Recently we developed a comprehensive system model of DNA storage, designed for archival storage, that captures the DNA constraints in this type of storage, and we analyze its system-level implications.

Related Links:

“Preservation DataStores: New storage paradigm for preservation environments” OAIS - Open Archival Information System "Towards a System Model for DNA-based Storage"

My current research area is Storage Systems, Cloud Storage and infrastructure for BigData.

Teachings

Publications

Cloud, Storage and Big Data

  • Towards a System Model for DNA-based Storage, by Stephanie Schustermann, Libi Kogan, Michael Factor, Dalit Naor and Gala Yadgar. HotStorage 2026

  • Dictionary Based Cache Line Compression, by Daniel Cohen, Sarel Cohen, Dalit Naor, Daniel G. Waddington and Moshik Hershcovitch. HotStorage 2024. Also, a poster in Systor 2023

  • Proceedings of the 21st USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies, FAST 2023, Santa Clara, CA, USA, February 21-23, 2023. By Ashvin Goel and Dalit Naor. Also, Introduction to the Special Section on USENIX FAST 2023. ACM Trans. Storage 19(4): 29:1-29:2 (2023)

  • Too Big to Eat: Boosting Analytics Data Ingestion from Object Stores with Scoop, by Yosef Moatti, Eran Rom et al. In IEEE 33rd International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE) 2017

  • Security intelligence for cloud management infrastructures, by Stefan Berger, et al. IBM Journal of Research and Development 60

  • Iostack: Software-defined object storage, by R Gracia-Tinedo et al, IEEE Internet Computing 20 (3), 10-18. (2016).

  • SDGen: Mimicking Datasets for Content Generation in Storage Benchmarks, by Raúl Gracia-Tinedo, Danny Harnik, Dalit Naor, Dmitry Sotnikov, Sivan Toledo and Aviad Zuck. FAST 2015.

  • Estimation of deduplication ratios in large data sets, by Danny Harnik, Oded Margalit, Dalit Naor, Dmitry Sotnikov and Gil Vernik. IEEE 28th Symposium on Mass Storage Systems and Technologies (MSST) 2012

  • A Cloud Environment for Data-intensive Storage Services, by E.K. Kolodner et al. IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing Technology and Science (CloudCom) 2011

  • Low Power Mode in Cloud Storage Systems, by Danny Harnik, Dalit Naor and Itai Segall, The Fifth International Workshop on System Management Techniques, Processes, and Services (SMTPS 2009), Special Focus on Cloud Computing, col-located with IPDPS

  • Storage Modeling for Power Estimation, by Miriam Allalouf, Yuriy Arbitman, Michael Factor, Ronen Kat, Kalman Meth and Dalit Naor, SYSTOR 2009

  • Preservation DataStores: New storage paradigm for preservation environments. Simona Rabinovici-Cohen, Michael Factor, Dalit Naor, Leeat Ramati, Petra Reshef, Shahar Ronen, Julian Satran, David L. Giaretta. IBM Journal of Research and Development (52)

  • The ANSI T10 object-based storage standard and current implementations. David Nagle, Michael Factor, Sami Iren, Dalit Naor, Erik Riedel, Ohad Rodeh, Julian Satran. IBM Journal of Research and Development (52)

  • Capability based Secure Access Control to Networked Storage Devices. Michael Factor, Dalit Naor, Eran Rom, Julian Satran, Sivan Tal. MSST 2007

  • Preservation datastores: Architecture for preservation aware storage. Michael Factor, Dalit Naor, Simona Rabinovici-Cohen, Leeat Ramati, Petra Reshef, Julian Satran, David L Giaretta. MSST 2007

  • The need for preservation aware storage: a position paper. Michael Factor, Dalit Naor, Simona Rabinovici-Cohen, Leeat Ramati, Petra Reshef, Julian Satran. Operating Systems Review 2007.

  • Toward Securing Untrusted Storage without Public-Key Operations. Dalit Naor, Amir Shenhav, Avishai Wool. Proceedings of the 2005 ACM workshop on Storage security and survivability (StorageSS)

  • Object storage: The future building block for storage systems. Michael Factor, Kalman Meth, Dalit Naor, Ohad Rodeh, Julian Satran. MSST 2005

  • The OSD Security Protocol. Michael Factor, David Nagle, Dalit Naor, Erik Riedel, Julian Satran. International IEEE Security in Storage Workshop (SISW) 2005

  • Towards an object store. A. Azagury et al. MSST 2003.

  • A two-layered approach for securing an object store network. Alain Azagury, Ran Canetti, Michael Factor, Shai Halevi, Ealan Henis, Dalit Naor, Noam Rinetzky, Ohad Rodeh, Julian Satran. International IEEE Security in Storage Workshop (SISW) 2002

Content Protection and Security

  • Revocation and Tracing Schemes for Stateless Receivers. Dalit Naor, Moni Naor, Jeffery Lotspiech. CRYPTO 2001

  • Protecting Cryptographic Keys: The Trace-and-Revoke Approach. Dalit Naor, Moni Naor. IEEE Computer, 2003

  • Clock synchronization with faults and recoveries. Boaz Barak, Shai Halevi, Amir Herzberg, and Dalit Naor. PODC, 2000

  • Access Control Meets Public Key Infrastructure, Or: Assigning Roles to Strangers. Amir Herzberg, Yosi Mass, Joris Mihaeli, Dalit Naor, Yiftach Ravid. IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy 2000

  • The Proactive Security Toolkit and Applications. Boaz Barak, Amir Herzberg, Dalit Naor, Eldad Shai. ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security 1999

  • Surf'N'Sign: Client Signatures on Web Documents, Amir Herzberg, Dalit Naor. IBM Systems Journal 1998

Bioinformatics

  • Interchanges of spatially neighbouring residues in structurally conserved environments. Einat Azarya-Sprinzak, Dalit Naor, Haim Wolfson and Ruth Nussinov. Protein Engineering, 1997

  • Amino Acid Pair Interchanges at Spatially Conserved Locations. Dalit Naor, Daniel Fischer, Robert L. Jernigan, Haim J. Wolfson and Ruth Nussinov. Journal of Molecular Biology, 1996

  • On Near-Optimal Alignments of Biological Sequences. Dalit Naor, Douglas L. Brutlag. Journal of Computational Biology , 1994

  • Parametric Optimization of Sequence Alignment. Dan Gusfield, K. Balasubramanian, Dalit Naor. SODA 1992. Also in Algorithmica, 1994

  • On suboptimal alignments of biological sequences. Dalit Naor, Douglas Brutlag. Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching, 1993

  • A Lower Bound on the Number of Solutions to the Probed Partial Digest Problem. Lee Newberg and Dalit Naor. Advances in Applied Mathematics, 1993

Combinatorial Optimization

  • A Fast Algorithm for Optimally Increasing the Edge Connectivity. Dalit Naor, Dan Gusfield, Charles Martel. FOCS 1990. Also, in SIAM J. Comput. 1997

  • Extracting Maximal Information About Sets of Minimum Cuts. Dan Gusfield, Dalit Naor. Algorithmica 1993

  • Efficient Algorithms for Generalized Cut Trees. Dan Gusfield, Dalit Naor. SODA 1990

  • Representing and enumerating edge connectivity cuts in RNC. Dalit Naor, Vijay V Vazirani. Workshop on Algorithms and Data Structures (1991)

  • Performance of Priority Queue Structures in a Virtual Memory Environment. Dalit Naor, Charles U. Martel, Norman S. Matloff. The Computer Journal, 1991

Computing Workplace

  • Beyond the Pipeline: A Gender Lens on Priorities and Exit Triggers in the High-Tech Industry. Amit Kaplan, Dalit Naor, Ella Rabinovich, Iris Rahav, Adi Shraibman. Commun. ACM 69(7): 64-73 (2026)

Popular Press

Academic Services

Miscellaneous

  • I am the mother of Yael, Efrat and Avner and married to Moni.

Contact

Send Mail +972-3-680-2332
  • School of Computer Science
  • Academic College Tel-Aviv-Yaffo
  • Weston Building 2, room #341
  • Rabenu Yeruham St.
  • P.O.B 8401 Yaffo
  • 6818211, Israel
The Academic College of Tel Aviv Yaffo

About the Academic College Tel-Aviv-Yaffo

The college is located at the heart of Yaffo. The School of Computer Science and AI provides an excellence computer science academic education (B.Sc and M.Sc ), combining strong theoretical and fundamental education with cutting-edge practical training.
Its faculty are active researchers in diverse CS areas, while at the same time excel in high-quality teaching.
Its 5000+ alumni are well positioned professionals in Israel's high-tech sector.
As the dean, I continuously work to adapt its curriculum to the changing needs of the industry, strengthening our ties with the vibrant hi-tech ecosystem in Israel, while ensuring excellence and relevance of our academic program, making our school a leading program in Computer Science and AI in Israel.