Amit Sahai is an American computer scientist. He is a professor of computer science at UCLA and the director of the Center for Encrypted Functionalities.
Amit Sahai's research interests are in security and cryptography, and theoretical computer science more broadly. He has published more than 100 original technical research papers. Notable contributions by Sahai include:
Obfuscation. Sahai is a co-inventor of the first candidate general-purpose indistinguishability obfuscation schemes, with security based on a mathematical conjecture. This development generated much interest in the cryptography community and was called "a watershed moment for cryptography." Earlier, Sahai co-authored a seminal paper formalizing the notion of cryptographic obfuscation and showing that strong forms of this notion are impossible to realize.
Results on Zero-Knowledge Proofs. Sahai co-authored several important results on zero-knowledge proofs, in particular introducing the concept of concurrent zero-knowledge proofs. Sahai also co-authored the paper that introduced the MPC-in-the-head technique for using secure multi-party computation protocols for efficient zero-knowledge proofs.
Results on Secure Multi-Party Computation. Sahai is a co-author on many important results on MPC, including the first universally composably secure MPC protocol, the first such protocol that avoided the need for trusted set-ups and the IPS compiler for building efficient MPC protocols. He is also a co-editor of a book on the topic.
Sahai has given a number of invited talks including the 2004 Distinguished Cryptographer Lecture Series at NTT Labs, Japan. He was named an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellow in 2002, received an Okawa Research Grant Award in 2007, a Xerox Foundation Faculty Award in 2010, and a Google Faculty Research Award in 2010. His research has been covered by several news agencies including the BBC World Service. Sahai was elected as an ACM Fellow in 2018 for "contributions to cryptography and to the development of indistinguishability obfuscation". In 2019, he was named a Fellow of the International Association for Cryptologic Research for "fundamental contributions, including to secure computation, zero knowledge, and functional encryption, and for service to the IACR."
