Aayush Jain, a UCLA Alumni, received the prestigious 2022 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award for his thesis titled “Indistinguishability Obfuscation from Well-Studied Assumptions.” This groundbreaking research demonstrated the viability of rigorous software obfuscation using established hardness conjectures, marking a significant achievement in the field.
The primary objective of software obfuscation is to transform source code to make it unintelligible without altering what it computes. The mathematical object that Jain’s thesis constructs, indistinguishability obfuscation, is considered a theoretical “master tool” in the context of cryptography—not only in helping achieve long-desired cryptographic goals such as functional encryption, but also in expanding the scope of the field of cryptography itself. For example, indistinguishability obfuscation aids in goals related to software security that were previously entirely in the domain of software engineering. Jain’s dissertation received the esteemed Best Paper Award at the ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (ACM STOC 2021) and was featured in an article titled “Scientists Achieve Crown Jewel of Cryptography” published in Quanta Magazine.
Jain is currently an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. His research interests include theoretical and applied cryptography and its connections with related areas of theoretical computer science. Jain received a BTech in Electrical Engineering, and an MTech in Information and Communication Technology from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. He also received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Presented annually to the author(s) of the best doctoral dissertation(s) in computer science and engineering, the Doctoral Dissertation Award includes a prize of $20,000,while the Honorable Mention Award presents a prize totaling $10,000. Winning dissertations will be published in the ACM Digital Library as part of the ACM Books Series.