Dr. Brent Waters

Waters is recognized for introducing the concepts of Attribute-Based Encryption and Functional Encryption which allow granting different forms of selective access to a plaintext message from its encrypted form. This is an important departure from traditional public-key encryption, where access to the encrypted data is all or nothing. Besides the theoretical value and the great following of his work in the cryptography community, the techniques he developed also had practical impact, having been incorporated in real systems.