Amit Sahai

Amit Sahai
Amit Sahai
Born	Amit Sahai; 1974 (age 51–52); Thousand Oaks, California, U.S.
Alma mater	UC Berkeley (BA); MIT (PhD);
Known for	Indistinguishability obfuscation; Attribute-based encryption; Functional encryption; Concurrent zero-knowledge proofs; Secure multi-party computation;
Awards	Sloan Research Fellowship (2002); ACM Fellow (2018); IACR Fellow (2019); Simons Investigator (2021); AMS Fellow (2024); Held Prize (2022);
	Scientific career
Fields	Computer science, cryptography
Institutions	Princeton University (2000–2004); UCLA (2004–present)
Thesis	Frontiers in Zero Knowledge (2000)
Doctoral advisor	Shafi Goldwasser
Doctoral students	Edith Elkind; Brent Waters; Aayush Jain;
Website	www.cs.ucla.edu/~sahai/

Amit Sahai (born 1974) is an Indian-American computer scientist and cryptographer. He is a professor of computer science and (by courtesy) mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he holds the Symantec Endowed Chair in Computer Science and directs the Center for Encrypted Functionalities, a National Science Foundation Frontiers Center. He is a Fellow of the ACM, a Fellow of the International Association for Cryptologic Research, and a Simons Investigator.

Sahai is known for foundational contributions to cryptography, including the co-invention of indistinguishability obfuscation, attribute-based encryption, and functional encryption. In 2020, Sahai and collaborators resolved a central open problem in cryptography by constructing indistinguishability obfuscation from well-founded assumptions, a result described as achieving the "crown jewel" of the field. He received the 2022 Michael and Sheila Held Prize for this work and delivered an invited special sectional lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2022.