Amit Sahai (born 1974) is an American computer scientist. He is a professor of

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and the director of the Center for Encrypted Functionalities.

Biography

Amit Sahai was born in 1974 in Thousand Oaks, California, to parents who had immigrated from India. He received a B.A. in mathematics with a computer science minor from the University of California, Berkeley, summa cum laude, in 1996. At Berkeley, Sahai was named Computing Research Association Outstanding Undergraduate of the Year, North America, and was a member of the three-person team that won first place in the 1996

ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest The ICPC International Collegiate Programming Contest, known as the ICPC, is an annual multi-tiered competitive programming competition among the universities of the world. Directed by ICPC Executive Director and Baylor Professor Dr. William B. ...

. Sahai received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...

in 2000, and joined the computer science faculty at

Princeton University Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the ...

. In 2004 he moved to

, where he currently holds the position of Professor of Computer Science.

Research and Recognition

Amit Sahai's research interests are in security and cryptography, and theoretical computer science more broadly. He has published more than 100 original technical research papers. Notable contributions by Sahai include: * Obfuscation. Sahai is a co-inventor of the first candidate general-purpose

indistinguishability obfuscation In cryptography, indistinguishability obfuscation (abbreviated IO or iO) is a type of software obfuscation with the defining property that obfuscating any two programs that compute the same mathematical function results in programs that cannot b ...

schemes, with security based on a mathematical conjecture. This development generated much interest in the cryptography community and was called "a watershed moment for cryptography." Earlier, Sahai co-authored a seminal paper formalizing the notion of cryptographic obfuscation and showing that strong forms of this notion are impossible to realize. * Functional Encryption. Sahai co-authored papers which introduced attribute-based encryption and functional encryption. * Results on Zero-Knowledge Proofs. Sahai co-authored several important results on zero-knowledge proofs, in particular introducing the concept of concurrent zero-knowledge proofs. Sahai also co-authored the paper that introduced the ''MPC-in-the-head'' technique for using

secure multi-party computation Secure multi-party computation (also known as secure computation, multi-party computation (MPC) or privacy-preserving computation) is a subfield of cryptography with the goal of creating methods for parties to jointly compute a function over their ...

(MPC) protocols for efficient zero-knowledge proofs. * Results on Secure Multi-Party Computation. Sahai is a co-author on many important results on MPC, including the first universally composably secure MPC protocol, the first such protocol that avoided the need for trusted set-ups (using "Angel-aided simulation") and the ''IPS compiler'' for building efficient MPC protocols. He is also a co-editor of a book on the topic. Sahai has given a number of invited talks including the 2004 Distinguished Cryptographer Lecture Series at NTT Labs, Japan. He was named an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellow in 2002, received an Okawa Research Grant Award in 2007, a Xerox Foundation Faculty Award in 2010, and a Google Faculty Research Award in 2010. His research has been covered by several news agencies including the BBC World Service. Sahai was elected as an

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in 2018 for "contributions to cryptography and to the development of indistinguishability obfuscation". In 2019, he was named a Fellow of the

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for "fundamental contributions, including to secure computation, zero knowledge, and functional encryption, and for service to the IACR." Sahai was named a Simons Investigator by the

Simons Foundation The Simons Foundation is a private foundation established in 1994 by Marilyn and Jim Simons with offices in New York City. As one of the largest charitable organizations in the US with assets of over $5 billion in 2022, the foundation's mission ...

in 2021. He was also named a

Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts The Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA), also known as the Royal Society of Arts, is a London-based organisation committed to finding practical solutions to social challenges. The RSA acronym is used m ...

. In 2022, he received the Michael and Shelia Held Prize from the National Academy of Sciences for “outstanding, innovative, creative, and influential research in the areas of combinatorial and discrete optimization, or related parts of computer science, such as the design and analysis of algorithms and complexity theory.”

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Sahai, Amit Modern cryptographers University of California, Berkeley alumni MIT School of Engineering alumni Theoretical computer scientists Living people 1974 births People from Thousand Oaks, California Princeton University faculty UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science faculty Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Competitive programmers Indian American American people of Indian descent