Amit 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, known for foundational contributions to cryptography including the co-invention of indistinguishability obfuscation, attribute-based encryption and functional encryption. In 2020 he and collaborators resolved a central open problem in cryptography by constructing indistinguishability obfuscation from well-founded assumptions, work for which he received the 2022 Michael and Sheila Held Prize.