Amit Sahai

About

Amit Sahai is a professor of computer science at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering and the director of the Center for Encrypted Functionalities, a National Science Foundation Frontiers Center. His research interests are in the foundations of computer security and cryptography, with particular focus on hiding secrets in software, secure program obfuscation, cryptographic proofs, and secure multiparty computation. Sahai is a co-inventor of attribute-based encryption, functional encryption, and indistinguishability obfuscation. He holds the Symantec Endowed Chair in Computer Science and has been recognized as a Simons Investigator and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, ACM, and IACR. Prior to UCLA, he was on the faculty at Princeton University, and he earned his Ph.D. from MIT in 2000. Sahai has published over 150 technical research papers and serves as an editor for the Journal of Cryptology. His work has been widely covered in the media, and he has received numerous awards for his contributions to cryptography and computer security.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Computer Security
• Programming language
• Artificial Intelligence
• Theoretical computer science
• Mathematics
• Discrete mathematics
• Operating system
• Algorithm

Selected publications

• Indistinguishability obfuscation from well-founded assumptions

  2021 · 220 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Indistinguishability obfuscation, introduced by [Barak et. al. Crypto 2001], aims to compile programs into unintelligible ones while preserving functionality. It is a fascinating and powerful object that has been shown to enable a host of new cryptographic goals and beyond. However, constructions of indistinguishability obfuscation have remained elusive, with all other proposals relying on heuristics or newly conjectured hardness assumptions. In this work, we show how to construct indistinguisha…

  DOI

• Indistinguishability Obfuscation from LPN over $$\mathbb {F}_p$$, DLIN, and PRGs in NC$$^0$$

  Lecture notes in computer science · 2022 · 92 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  DOI

• Statistical ZAP Arguments

  Lecture notes in computer science · 2020 · 34 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  DOI

• Indistinguishability Obfuscation from Well-Founded Assumptions

  Journal of the ACM · 2025-12-12 · 20 citations

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  Indistinguishability obfuscation, introduced by [Barak et. al. Crypto’2001], aims to compile programs into unintelligible ones while preserving functionality. It is a fascinating and powerful object that has been shown to enable a host of new cryptographic goals and beyond. However, constructions of indistinguishability obfuscation have remained elusive, with all other proposals relying on heuristics or newly conjectured hardness assumptions. In this work, we show how to construct indistinguisha…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Indistinguishability Obfuscation from Well-Founded Assumptions

  Communications of the ACM · 2024-02-22 · 8 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  At least since the initial public proposal of public-key cryptography based on computational hardness conjectures, cryptographers have contemplated the possibility of a "one-way compiler" that translates computer programs into "incomprehensible" but equivalent forms. And yet, the search for such a "one-way compiler" remained elusive for decades. We examine a formalization of this concept with the notion of indistinguishability obfuscation (iO) . Roughly speaking, iO requires that the compiled ve…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• ITR: New Directions in Software Security

  NSF · $374k · 2004–2008

• TC: Small: New Directions in Encryption

  NSF · $495k · 2011–2015

• CT-ISG: New Directions in Cryptographic Proof Systems

  NSF · $350k · 2006–2010

Frequent coauthors

• Yuval Ishai

  72 shared

• Brent Waters

  61 shared

• Aayush Jain

  50 shared

• Vipul Goyal

  Regional Cancer Center, Thiruvananthapuram

  48 shared

• Rafail Ostrovsky

  44 shared

• Manoj Prabhakaran

  Dhanalakshmi Srinivasan Group of Institutions

  39 shared

• Dakshita Khurana

  37 shared

• Abhishek Jain

  Johns Hopkins University

  31 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Computer Science

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

  2000

• B.S.

  Princeton University

Awards & honors

• Simons Investigator Award (2021)
• Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (2021)
• Fellow of the ACM (2018)
• Fellow of the IACR (2019)
• Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellow (2002)

Similar researchers at University of California, Los Angeles

• Demetri Terzopoulosh-93
• Wei Wangh-91
• Eleazar Eskinh-83