Mihir Bellare is a cryptographer and professor at the University of California San Diego. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree from the California Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.^[2] He has published several seminal papers in the field of cryptography (notably in the area of provable security), many of which were co-written with Phillip Rogaway. Bellare has published a number of papers in the field of Format-Preserving Encryption. His students include Michel Abdalla, Chanathip Namprempre, Tadayoshi Kohno and Anton Mityagin. Bellare is one of the authors of skein.

In 2003 Bellare was a recipient of RSA Conference's Sixth Annual Award for outstanding contributions in the field of mathematics for his research in cryptography.^[3] In 2013 he became a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.^[4] In 2019 he was awarded Levchin Prize for Real-World Cryptography for his outstanding contributions to the design and analysis of real-world cryptosystems, including the development of random oracle model, modes of operation, HMAC, and models for key exchange.^[5]

Bellare's papers cover topics including:

• HMAC
• Random oracle
• OAEP
• Probabilistic signature scheme
• Provable security
• Format-preserving encryption

On September 14, 2022, Bellare was appointed by the Mayor of San Diego to the city's Privacy Advisory Board.^[6][2]