Brent Waters

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.

Brent Waters
Alma mater	Princeton University
Awards	Grace Murray Hopper Award (2015)
Scientific career
Fields	Theoretical computer science
Institutions	University of Texas at Austin
Thesis	Cryptographic algorithms for privacy in an age of ubiquitous recording  (2004)
Doctoral advisor	Edward Felten Amit Sahai

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.^[1] 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

• Goyal, Vipul; Pandey, Omkant; Sahai, Amit; Waters, Brent (2006). "Attribute-based encryption for fine-grained access control of encrypted data". Proceedings of the 13th ACM conference on Computer and communications security. pp. 89–98. doi:10.1145/1180405.1180418. ISBN 1595935185. S2CID 5131034.
• John Bethencourt; Amit Sahai; Brent Waters (May 2007), Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption, doi:10.1109/SP.2007.11, Wikidata Q107459178
• Sahai, Amit; Waters, Brent (2005). "Fuzzy Identity-Based Encryption". Advances in Cryptology – EUROCRYPT 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol. 3494. pp. 457–473. doi:10.1007/11426639_27. ISBN 978-3-540-25910-7.
• Waters, Brent (2005). "Efficient Identity-Based Encryption Without Random Oracles". Advances in Cryptology – EUROCRYPT 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol. 3494. pp. 114–127. doi:10.1007/11426639_7. ISBN 978-3-540-25910-7.
• Waters, Brent (2011). "Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption: An Expressive, Efficient, and Provably Secure Realization". Public Key Cryptography – PKC 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol. 6571. Public Key Cryptography – PKC 2011. pp. 53–70. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-19379-8_4. ISBN 978-3-642-19378-1.