An interview with Yael Tauman Kalai, a Microsoft cryptographer who won the 2022 ACM Prize in Computing, on cryptography, “post-quantum” security, and more
Yael Tauman Kalai's breakthroughs secure the digital world, from cloud computing to our quantum future.
Context & Ripple Effects
The interview caps an eight-year arc of coverage: Quanta first flagged in 2015 why modern encryption must adapt to resist quantum attacks, Nautilus explained the mechanics in 2017, and by 2020 the Wall Street Journal was tracking a full-blown competition to set new encryption standards replacing RSA-era public-key methods.
Kalai's 2022 ACM Prize puts a named researcher at the center of that story. Her interview lands alongside reporting on how US agencies are bracing for "harvest now, decrypt later" adversaries who stockpile encrypted data today for decryption once quantum machines mature — making the timing less about one award than about who shapes the post-quantum transition.
First-order effects
- Kalai gains a high-profile platform to frame post-quantum priorities, and Microsoft's research organization gets visible credit as the institutional home of prize-winning cryptography work.
Second-order effects
- Enterprises and government buyers still running RSA-class public-key systems face sharpened urgency to plan migrations, since the harvest-now-decrypt-later threat means data encrypted today is already exposed to future decryption.
Third-order effects
- If the standards competition continues on its current path, the cryptographers and institutions whose schemes get standardized will hold durable structural influence over how every cloud provider, agency, and vendor re-architects trust online.
The trend: Cryptography is moving from a quantum-threat warning phase into a standardization-and-migration phase, with individual researchers like Kalai becoming the public faces of that transition.