Assistant Professor Omkant Pandey, along with his co-authors Vipul Goyal, Amit Sahai, and Brent Waters, have won the 2016 ACM CCS Test-of-Time Award (Association for Computing Machinery; Computer and Communications Security) for their work on attribute based data encryption.

Their paper, Attribute-Based Encryption for Fine-Grained Access Control of Encrypted Data, was one of two selected for the prestigious award.

“The Test-of-Time Award recognizes works that have had significant impact on the field, as seen from a ten-year perspective. Every year since 2012, ACM CCS awards the Test-of-Time Award to two papers that appeared 10 years ago at the ACM CCS conference,” Pandey said via email. He is thankful to the computer security community for recognizing this work via the Test-of-Time award.

The 2006 paper, which had been presented at the 2006 ACM CCS conference, focused on sharing encrypted data among authorized parties. Encrypted data requires a private key to access it, and sharing it becomes highly problematic with traditional encryption. Pandey and his co-authors invented a new system based on “attributes” for better sharing of the encrypted data. “It is particularly useful in complex settings involving data sharing and avoids scalability issues,” Pandey said.

This year’s Test-of-Time Award was presented at the 23rd ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, held in Vienna, Austria, October 24-28.

Pandey joined the Department of Computer Science at Stony Brook in 2016. Pandey, who earned his PhD from UCLA, is affiliated with the National Security Institute at Stony Brook.

By: Katherine Kurre