Brent Waters

Brent Waters
Name	Brent Waters
Nationality	American
Fields	Cryptography, Computer Science
Workplaces	University of Texas at Austin, IBM Research, Georgia Institute of Technology
Alma mater	Brown University, Carnegie Mellon University
Doctoral advisor	Anna Lysyanskaya
Known for	Attribute-based encryption, Functional encryption, Pairing-based cryptography

Brent Waters is an American computer scientist and cryptographer noted for foundational work in attribute-based encryption, functional encryption, and pairing-based cryptography. He is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin with prior appointments at Georgia Institute of Technology and positions at IBM Research. Waters's research blends theoretical foundations from complexity theory with applied systems work relevant to cloud computing, privacy-preserving protocols, and secure outsourcing.

Early life and education

Waters received his undergraduate degree from Brown University and a Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University under the supervision of Anna Lysyanskaya. During his doctoral studies he worked closely with researchers at Brown University, MIT, and collaborators at RSA Laboratories and IBM Research. His dissertation engaged techniques from bilinear pairings, identity-based encryption, and reductions to assumptions used in the random oracle model.

Academic career

Waters joined the faculty at the Georgia Institute of Technology before moving to the University of Texas at Austin, and he has held visiting positions at Microsoft Research and ETH Zurich. He has collaborated with scholars at Harvard University, Stanford University, Princeton University, Columbia University, Cornell University, and international groups at Tel Aviv University and EPFL. Waters has taught courses connected to curricula at the ACM and IEEE, supervised doctoral students who later joined industry labs at Google Research, Amazon Web Services, and academic departments at UC Berkeley.

Research and contributions

Waters is widely cited for pioneering constructions in attribute-based encryption (ABE) and novel formulations of functional encryption (FE). His work introduced expressive ABE schemes supporting expressive access policies built from boolean formulas, linear secret-sharing schemes, and pairing-friendly curves such as those used in pairing-based cryptography. He contributed to security proofs under assumptions like the Decisional Bilinear Diffie-Hellman (DBDH) and variants of the Learning With Errors (LWE) problem, connecting FE to lattice-based assumptions important for post-quantum cryptography. Waters developed techniques for delegatable credentials and key-policy ABE that influenced systems for encrypted search, secure multi-party computation, and privacy in cloud storage architectures. His papers introduced reductions and game-based proofs used by researchers at IACR, CRYPTO, EUROCRYPT, and ASIACRYPT, and informed standardization discussions at organizations including the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and applied groups at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

Awards and honors

Waters's contributions have been recognized with best paper awards at venues such as CRYPTO and EUROCRYPT, and he has received fellowships and awards from institutions including the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). He is an elected member of program committees for ACM and IEEE conferences, has been named in lists of influential young researchers by publications associated with MIT Technology Review, and has been invited to deliver keynote lectures at RSA Conference, IACR events, and workshops hosted by Google Research and Microsoft Research.

Selected publications

- Waters authored seminal papers presented at CRYPTO and EUROCRYPT introducing key-policy and ciphertext-policy constructions for attribute-based encryption and for early notions of functional encryption; coauthors include researchers from Brown University, Carnegie Mellon University, IBM Research, and Microsoft Research. - He coauthored influential work on practical implementations of pairing-based systems evaluated against standards used in TLS deployments and applied to secure group messaging used by teams at WhatsApp and Signal research groups. - Waters contributed to lattice-based functional encryption research that connected to submissions to NIST's post-quantum cryptography process and to workshops at Simons Institute.

Professional service and mentorship

Waters has served on program committees for flagship conferences including CRYPTO, EUROCRYPT, ASIACRYPT, PKC, and TCC, and as an editor for journals such as the Journal of Cryptology and transactions of the IEEE. He has advised doctoral candidates who became faculty at institutions like UC San Diego, University of Maryland, and Indiana University and researchers at Amazon and Google DeepMind. Waters has participated in collaborative projects funded by the NSF and DARPA and contributed to community resources maintained by the IACR and open-source efforts hosted by organizations such as GitHub and academic consortia at ICERM.

Category:Living people Category:American computer scientists Category:Cryptographers