The International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR) has named Cryptography & Information Security (CIS) Lab Distinguished Scientist and Director Brent Waters one of the eight IACR Fellows for 2024, an honor that recognizes outstanding members for technical and professional contributions. In an email announcement released on April 15, the IACR commended Waters “for the development of attribute-based encryption, functional encryption and other foundational concepts in cryptography, and for service to the cryptographic community.” Waters joined the CIS Lab in 2019 and became director in 2022. He is also a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Texas, Austin.
The IACR, which hosts top-tier events (including Asiacrypt, Crypto and Eurocrypt) and publishes several influential journals, established the Fellows Program in 2004. The number of Fellows selected in any one year is expected to be approximately 0.25 percent of total current membership, and no more than 0.5 percent. The IACR recognized all 2024 Fellows for their service to the cryptographic community or to the IACR. The technical contributions of the other honorees are in the areas of symmetric cryptography, secure computation, elliptic curve cryptography, data privacy, lattice-based cryptography, public-key cryptosystems and leakage. The IACR also issues Test-of-Time Awards to papers that have been deemed highly influential after a period of years. Waters has received two Test-of-Time Awards from the IACR, as well as one from the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and another from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).
Being named an IACR Fellow is a career accomplishment award. (In 2021 Waters also was named an ACM Fellow.) Test-of-Time Awards provide some highlights of the career being honored. In 2016, Waters received an ACM Test-of-Time Award from for his paper, “Attribute-Based Encryption for Fine-Grained Access Control of Encrypted Data,” delivered at the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) in 2006. In 2020, Waters received an IACR Test-of-Time Award for his 2005 paper, “Fuzzy Identity-Based Encryption,” delivered at Eurocrypt 2005. This paper introduced ABE, which was a precursor to functional encryption. In 2023, Waters received another IACR Test-of-Time Award for his paper, “A Framework for Efficient and Composable Oblivious Transfer,” presented at Crypto 2008. Also in 2023, Waters received a Test-of-Time Award for his paper, “Candidate Indistinguishability Obfuscation and Functional Encryption for All Circuits,” presented at the IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS) in 2013. UCLA Professor of Computer Science Amit Sahai was a co-author with Waters on three of those papers.
Waters’ more recent work has also been outstanding. He received a IACR Best Paper Award at Crypto 2020 for “Chosen Ciphertext Security from Injective Trapdoor Functions” and a Best Paper Award at Crypto 2022 for “Batch Arguments for NP and More from Standard Bilinear Group Assumptions.”
Four years after joining the faculty at the University of Texas at Austin in 2008, Waters was honored with a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). In 2015, he received the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, which honors the outstanding young computer professional of the year, selected on the basis of a single, significant technical or service contribution at or before age 35. In addition to receiving other fellowships and awards, Waters has also served over the years on the program committees of numerous events and conferences.
At NTT Research, Waters has been instrumental in building the CIS Lab into one of the world’s preeminent cryptography organizations. The number of CIS Lab-affiliated papers presented at the IACR’s top conferences, which has surpassed that of other organizations in some recent years, is one indicator of its influence.