Brent Waters
American computer scientist
Brent R. Waters is an American computer scientist, specializing in cryptography and computer security.
Early Life and Education
Brent R. Waters pursued his undergraduate studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, earning a BS in computer science in 2000. He went on to complete a PhD in computer science at Princeton University in 2004.
Career
Following his doctorate, Waters conducted post-doctoral research at Stanford University from 2004 to 2005, working under the supervision of Dan Boneh. He then joined SRI International as a computer scientist, a position he held until 2008. That same year, he joined the University of Texas at Austin, where he holds the title of Professor in the Department of Computer Science. In July 2019, he also joined NTT Research, contributing to their Cryptography and Information Security (CIS) Laboratory.
Notable Work
In 2005, Waters and Amit Sahai first proposed the concepts of attribute-based encryption (ABE) and functional encryption — two foundational ideas that significantly expanded the expressive power of public-key cryptography. Attribute-based encryption allows access to encrypted data to be governed by flexible, policy-driven attributes rather than simple identity-based keys, enabling fine-grained access control over encrypted information. Functional encryption generalizes this further, permitting a decryption key to reveal only a specific function of the encrypted data rather than the data in full.
Waters has continued to develop and refine these concepts through subsequent research. Notable publications include work on ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption, co-authored with John Bethencourt and Amit Sahai in 2007, and a 2011 paper presenting an expressive, efficient, and provably secure realization of ciphertext-policy ABE. Earlier foundational work appeared at EUROCRYPT 2005, including a paper on fuzzy identity-based encryption with Sahai and a solo paper on efficient identity-based encryption without random oracles.
Recognition
Waters has received numerous awards in recognition of his contributions to cryptography and computer science. He was awarded a Sloan Research Fellowship in 2010. In 2011, he received both the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers and a Packard Fellowship. In 2015, the Association for Computing Machinery presented him with the Grace Murray Hopper Award, specifically citing his introduction and development of attribute-based encryption and functional encryption. In 2019, he was named a Simons Investigator in theoretical computer science. He was elected an ACM Fellow in 2021.
