An Oral History Interview with Yuval Ishai

Abstract

This oral history interview is sponsored by NSF 2202484, “Mining a Usable Past: Perspectives, Paradoxes, and Possibilities with Security and Privacy,” at the Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota. The interview is with Yuval Ishai, Professor of Computer Science at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. Ishai discusses his upbringing between the United States and Israel, his early academic interests in mathematics and theoretical computer science, and his graduate education at the Weizmann Institute. He reflects on his contributions to secure multiparty computation, his collaborations with U.S.-based researchers, and the evolution of cryptography as a scientific and practical field. He also discusses his perspectives on academic publishing, the structure of the cryptography community, and the long-term stakes of cryptographic research for privacy and security.