Brent Waters Explained

Brent Waters
Alma Mater:	Princeton University
Awards:	Grace Murray Hopper Award (2015)
Fields:	Theoretical computer science
Workplaces:	University of Texas at Austin
Thesis Title:	Cryptographic algorithms for privacy in an age of ubiquitous recording
Thesis Year:	2004
Doctoral Advisor:	Edward Felten Amit Sahai

Brent R. Waters is an American computer scientist, specializing in cryptography and computer security. He is currently a professor of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin.

Career

Waters attended the University of California, Los Angeles, where he graduated in 2000 with a BS in computer science. He earned a PhD in computer science from Princeton University in 2004.^[1]

Waters completed his post-doctoral work at Stanford University from 2004 to 2005, hosted by Dan Boneh, and then worked at SRI International as a computer scientist until 2008. In 2008, he joined the University of Texas at Austin, where he currently holds the title of Professor in the Department of Computer Science. In July 2019, he joined NTT Research to work in their Cryptography and Information Security (CIS) Laboratory.^[2]

In 2005, Waters first proposed the concepts of attribute-based encryption and functional encryption with Amit Sahai.^[3]

Awards

Waters was awarded the Sloan Research Fellowship in 2010.^[1] In 2011, he was awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers^[4] and a Packard Fellowship.^[5] In 2015, he was awarded the Grace Murray Hopper Award for the introduction and development of the concepts of attribute-based encryption and functional encryption.^[6] In 2019, he was named a Simons Investigator in theoretical computer science.^[7] He was elected an ACM Fellow in 2021.^[8]

Selected publications

• Book: Goyal . Vipul . Pandey . Omkant . Sahai . Amit . Waters . Brent . Proceedings of the 13th ACM conference on Computer and communications security . Attribute-based encryption for fine-grained access control of encrypted data . 2006 . 89–98 . 10.1145/1180405.1180418. 1595935185 . 5131034 .
  • Book: Sahai . Amit . Waters . Brent . Advances in Cryptology – EUROCRYPT 2005 . Fuzzy Identity-Based Encryption . Lecture Notes in Computer Science . 2005 . 3494 . 457–473 . 10.1007/11426639_27. 978-3-540-25910-7 . free .
• Book: Waters . Brent . Advances in Cryptology – EUROCRYPT 2005 . Efficient Identity-Based Encryption Without Random Oracles . Lecture Notes in Computer Science . 2005 . 3494 . 114–127 . 10.1007/11426639_7. 978-3-540-25910-7 . free .
• Book: Waters . Brent . Public Key Cryptography – PKC 2011 . Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption: An Expressive, Efficient, and Provably Secure Realization . Public Key Cryptography – PKC 2011 . Lecture Notes in Computer Science . 2011 . 6571 . 53–70 . 10.1007/978-3-642-19379-8_4. 978-3-642-19378-1 . free .

External links

• Brent Waters at University of Texas

Notes and References

1. Web site: Brent Waters. https://web.archive.org/web/20190427000446/https://www.cs.utexas.edu/directory/brent-waters. April 27, 2019. The University of Texas at Austin Department of Computer Science.
2. Web site: Brent Waters on the Key to Cryptography . . February 14, 2021 . June 1, 2020.
3. Book: Amit. Sahai. Brent. Waters. Fuzzy Identity-Based Encryption. Proceedings of Eurocrypt 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science . 2005. 3494 . 457–473 . 10.1007/11426639_27 . 978-3-540-25910-7 . 10137076 . http://eprint.iacr.org/2004/086.pdf.
4. Web site: President Obama Honors Early Career Scientists and Engineers. nsf.gov. National Science Foundation.
5. Web site: Waters, Brent . . February 14, 2021.
6. Web site: 2015 ACM Technical Awards Winners. awards.acm.org.
7. Web site: Simons Investigators . . February 14, 2021.
8. Web site: Airhart . Marc G . Waters Named ACM Fellow by the Association for Computing Machinery . January 29, 2022 . . January 19, 2022.