Waters' main research interests are in cryptography and computer security. His work addresses the increasing trend toward cloud computing, and he is looking to lay the foundations for a new model to secure data stored in the cloud.

Third-party data centers where companies store their data have been high-value targets for attackers, Waters said. To prevent customer data from being leaked it should be stored in encrypted form only. "The problem is that traditional encryption systems do not work with many cloud applications," he said. They were designed only for sharing and exchanging data between single known users.

That traditional approach does not meet the needs of an enterprise storing data in the cloud that should be shared by huge groups of users, particularly if some users do not even exist in the system at the time the data is encrypted. For instance, a sales person could be hired after data he or she needs for work is being encrypted and saved in a cloud data center.

Waters wants to solve problems like this with so-called functional encryption. "It is a totally different vision for encryption," he said. Unlike traditional encryption where data is encrypted to individual users, with functional encryption one would embed certain access predicates directly into the ciphertext, Waters said.

These predicates would also be attributed to users depending on their access rights to certain data, Waters said. A sales person, for instance, would have credentials different from those of a manager. "If someone gets a certain attribute at a later time he will also be able to get access to the data," Waters said. This means an employee being promoted to a higher position would get new attributes and then be able to gain access to data available to managers only.