Brent R. Waters is an American computer scientist, specializing in cryptography and computer security. He is currently a professor of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin.

Waters attended the University of California, Los Angeles, where he graduated in 2000 with a BS in computer science. He earned a PhD in computer science from Princeton University in 2004.^[1]

Waters completed his post-doctoral work at Stanford University from 2004 to 2005, hosted by Dan Boneh, and then worked at SRI International as a computer scientist until 2008. In 2008, he joined the University of Texas at Austin, where he currently holds the title of Professor in the Department of Computer Science.^[1] In July 2019, he joined NTT Research to work in their Cryptography and Information Security (CIS) Laboratory.^[2]

In 2005, Waters first proposed the concepts of attribute-based encryption and functional encryption with Amit Sahai.^[3]

Waters was awarded the Sloan Research Fellowship in 2010.^[1] In 2011, he was awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers^[4] and a Packard Fellowship.^[5] In 2015, he was awarded the Grace Murray Hopper Award for the introduction and development of the concepts of attribute-based encryption and functional encryption.^[6] In 2019, he was named a Simons Investigator in theoretical computer science.^[7] He was elected an ACM Fellow in 2021.^[8]

• Goyal, Vipul; Pandey, Omkant; Sahai, Amit; Waters, Brent (2006). "Attribute-based encryption for fine-grained access control of encrypted data". Proceedings of the 13th ACM conference on Computer and communications security. pp. 89–98. doi:10.1145/1180405.1180418. ISBN 1595935185. S2CID 5131034.
• John Bethencourt; Amit Sahai; Brent Waters (May 2007), Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption, doi:10.1109/SP.2007.11, Wikidata Q107459178
• Sahai, Amit; Waters, Brent (2005). "Fuzzy Identity-Based Encryption". Advances in Cryptology – EUROCRYPT 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol. 3494. pp. 457–473. doi:10.1007/11426639_27. ISBN 978-3-540-25910-7.
• Waters, Brent (2005). "Efficient Identity-Based Encryption Without Random Oracles". Advances in Cryptology – EUROCRYPT 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol. 3494. pp. 114–127. doi:10.1007/11426639_7. ISBN 978-3-540-25910-7.
• Waters, Brent (2011). "Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption: An Expressive, Efficient, and Provably Secure Realization". Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol. 6571. pp. 53–70. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-19379-8_4. ISBN 978-3-642-19378-1. {{cite book}}: |journal= ignored (help); Missing or empty |title= (help)