Yael Tauman Kalai
More info
- Affiliation
- Microsoft Research, MIT
- Known for
- Ring signatures, verifiable delegation of computation
The cryptographer who co-invented ring signatures and later showed how to check a computation without redoing it.
As a graduate student in 2001, Kalai wrote How to Leak a Secret with Ron Rivest and Adi Shamir. It described ring signatures: a digital signature proving that someone in a group signed, without revealing who — and without the group having to cooperate or even know about it. The title had whistleblowers in mind. The idea lives on in, among other places, the Monero cryptocurrency.
Her later work is about delegation: how a weak client can let a powerful server do the computing and then cheaply verify that the answer is right. The 2008 GKR protocol, with Shafi Goldwasser and Guy Rothblum, is a cornerstone of several of today's proof systems, including some zk-SNARKs. She received the ACM Prize in Computing for 2022.