Yuval Ishai
More info
- Affiliation
- Technion
- Known for
- MPC-in-the-head, OT extension
Israeli cryptographer whose speciality is making expensive primitives cheap by borrowing them from one another.
In 2003 Ishai, Joe Kilian, Kobbi Nissim and Erez Petrank (IKNP) showed how a handful of costly oblivious transfers can be "extended" into millions using nothing but symmetric crypto. Without that trick, practical secure multiparty computation would still be an academic curiosity.
2007 brought MPC-in-the-head, with Eyal Kushilevitz, Rafail Ostrovsky and Amit Sahai: the prover simulates a multiparty protocol in its head and lets the verifier inspect a few of the imaginary parties. The result is a zero-knowledge proof with no structured assumptions, and the idea lives on in post-quantum signatures such as Picnic. With Elette Boyle and Niv Gilboa he also developed function secret sharing.