Dr. Brent Waters Wins Fifth Test-of-Time Award
2024年6月27日 - 9:07PM
ビジネスワイヤ(英語)
AMC STOC Conference Honors Paper on Using
Indistinguishability Obfuscation by Waters and Amit Sahai News
Highlights:
- STOC Test-of-Time Award recognizes papers published 10, 20 and
30 years earlier for long-term impact.
- Paper on Indistinguishability Obfuscation “changed the
landscape of cryptography.”
- CIS Lab Scientists presenting four papers at STOC 2024.
NTT Research, Inc., a division of NTT (TYO:9432), today
announced that a paper coauthored by Cryptography & Information
Security (CIS) Lab Director and Distinguished Scientist Brent
Waters has won an Association of Computing Machinery (ACM)
Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC) Test-of-Time Award. The
paper, titled “How to Use Indistinguishability Obfuscation:
Deniable Encryption, and More,” was delivered at STOC 2014. Waters
co-authored the paper with UCLA Professor of Computer Science Amit
Sahai. This is the fifth Test-of-Time Award that Waters has
received, and his second from ACM. Since 2020, STOC has honored
papers that were published 10, 20 and 30 years earlier, paying
particular attention to their long-term impact. This year’s award
recipients are being recognized at STOC 2024 in Vancouver, British
Columbia, June 24–28, 2024. In addition, CIS Lab scientists are
presenting four papers at this highly ranked conference on
theory.
The backdrop for the STOC 2014 paper is an earlier one presented
at the IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS)
2013, in which Waters et al. proposed the first candidate of a
cryptographically based obfuscation scheme. That paper, which also
won a Test-of-Time Award, showed the potential to achieve
obfuscation using mathematical tools and indistinguishability
obfuscation (iO), defined in terms of a transformed program that
continues to perform a functionality, while hiding its
implementation. The FOCS 2013 paper showed that iO was feasible,
but it was the STOC 2014 paper, according to Waters, “that opened
the utility and applications.” The awards committee of the ACM
Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory (SIG
ACT), which sponsors STOC, came to a similar conclusion.
“The [STOC 2014] Sahai-Waters paper changed the landscape of
cryptography by developing ingenious new techniques for leveraging
indistinguishability obfuscation towards powerful cryptographic
primitives,” the SIG ACT committee stated in its notification of
award. “Sahai and Waters demonstrated the surprising power of iO to
serve as a substitute for ideal (but unrealizable) flavors of
obfuscation in many cryptographic applications. This includes not
only standard public-key encryption schemes, but also
first-of-their-kind constructions of more advanced cryptographic
primitives.”
In the STOC 2014 paper, Waters and Sahai introduced a technique
for applying iO called “punctured programs” and used it to settle a
longstanding open problem of realizing deniable encryption. It also
suggested that iO become a “central hub” for cryptography. The
steady stream of papers that followed proved both the utility of iO
and the community’s interest in attempting to move it from
potentiality into the realm of well-grounded assumptions, which was
finally achieved in 2020. In addition to the Test-of-Time Awards
for the work on iO, Waters also won two others in 2020 and 2016,
respectively, from the IACR and ACM for papers that he and Sahai
wrote in 2005 and 2006 on attribute-based encryption (ABE). Waters’
other Test-of-Time Award came in 2023 for a paper on oblivious
transfer delivered at IACR Crypto 2008.
The CIS Lab has an additional presence at STOC 2024. This year’s
program committee selected the following four papers by Waters
(including one on iO), CIS Lab Senior Scientist Elette Boyle and
CIS Lab Scientist and Hebrew University Professor Ilan
Komargodski:
- “Memory Checking Requires Logarithmic Overhead;” Boyle,
Komargodski and Neekon Vafa (MIT)
- “Optimal Load-Balanced Scalable Distributed Agreement;” Yuval
Gelles (Hebrew University) and Komargodski
- “A New Approach for Non-Interactive Zero-Knowledge from
Learning with Errors;” Waters
- “Adaptively-Sound Succinct Arguments for NP from
Indistinguishability Obfuscation,” Waters and David J. Wu
(University of Texas at Austin)
STOC 2024 is part of a five-day “TheoryFest,” which features
STOC papers, poster sessions, invited talks, workshops, tutorials
and social events. Avi Wigderson, a professor at the Princeton
University Institute for Advanced Study’s School of Mathematics, is
presenting the Turing Award lecture. Founded in 2019 as part of NTT
Research Inc., the CIS Lab has assembled a team of world-class
cryptographers, whose work has made landmark contributions through
participation in leading international conferences and
collaboration with academic and industry counterparts.
About NTT Research
NTT Research opened its offices in July 2019 as a new Silicon
Valley startup to conduct basic research and advance technologies
that promote positive change for humankind. Currently, three labs
are housed at NTT Research facilities in Sunnyvale: the Physics and
Informatics (PHI) Lab, the Cryptography and Information Security
(CIS) Lab, and the Medical and Health Informatics (MEI) Lab. The
organization aims to upgrade reality in three areas: 1) quantum
information, neuroscience and photonics; 2) cryptographic and
information security; and 3) medical and health informatics. NTT
Research is part of NTT, a global technology and business solutions
provider with an annual R&D budget of $3.6 billion.
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