He was previously a researcher in the Cryptography Group at Microsoft Research. Kamara's research interests are in cryptography and security with a focus on privacy issues in surveillance, cloud computing and databases. In 2016, he was named as a Dukakis Fellow by Boston Global Forum. In 2006, he was a research fellow at the UCLA Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics. In 2012, Kamara chaired the ACM Cloud Computing Security Workshop. In 2015, he founded the Workshop on Surveillance and Technology. He received his Ph.D. in computer science from Johns Hopkins University.