Nigel Smart is a professor at

COSIC The Computer Security and Industrial Cryptography research group, commonly called COSIC, is a research group at the Department of Electrical Engineering of KU Leuven, which is headed by Bart Preneel. Research Research and expertise in digital s ...

at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. He is a cryptographer with expertise in the theory of cryptography and its application in practice.

Education

Smart received a BSc degree in mathematics from the

University of Reading The University of Reading is a public university in Reading, Berkshire, England. It was founded in 1892 as University College, Reading, a University of Oxford extension college. The institution received the power to grant its own degrees in 192 ...

in 1989. He then obtained his

PhD degree A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is ...

from the

University of Kent , motto_lang = , mottoeng = Literal translation: 'Whom to serve is to reign'(Book of Common Prayer translation: 'whose service is perfect freedom')Graham Martin, ''From Vision to Reality: the Making of the University of Kent at Canterbury'' ...

Canterbury Canterbury (, ) is a cathedral city and UNESCO World Heritage Site, situated in the heart of the City of Canterbury local government district of Kent, England. It lies on the River Stour. The Archbishop of Canterbury is the primate of ...

in 1992; his thesis was titled ''The Computer Solutions of Diophantine Equations''.

Career

Smart proceeded to work as a

research fellow A research fellow is an academic research position at a university or a similar research institution, usually for academic staff or faculty members. A research fellow may act either as an independent investigator or under the supervision of a pr ...

at the University of Kent, the

Erasmus University Rotterdam Erasmus University Rotterdam (abbreviated as ''EUR'', nl, Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam ) is a public research university located in Rotterdam, Netherlands. The university is named after Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus, a 15th-century humani ...

, and Cardiff University until 1995. From 1995 to 1997, he was a lecturer in mathematics at the University of Kent, and then spent three years in industry at Hewlett-Packard from 1997 to 2000. From 2000 to 2017 he was at the University of Bristol, where he founded the cryptology research group. From 2018 he has been based in the COSIC group at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. Smart held a

Royal Society The Royal Society, formally The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, is a learned society and the United Kingdom's national academy of sciences. The society fulfils a number of roles: promoting science and its benefits, re ...

Wolfson Merit Award (2008–2013), and two ERC Advanced Grant (2011–2016 and 2016-2021). He was a director of the

International Association for Cryptologic Research International is an adjective (also used as a noun) meaning "between nations". International may also refer to: Music Albums * ''International'' (Kevin Michael album), 2011 * ''International'' (New Order album), 2002 * ''International'' (The T ...

(2012–2014), and was elected Vice President for the period 2014-2016. In 2016 he was named as a Fellow of the IACR.

Research

Prof. Smart is best known for his work in

elliptic curve cryptography Elliptic-curve cryptography (ECC) is an approach to public-key cryptography based on the algebraic structure of elliptic curves over finite fields. ECC allows smaller keys compared to non-EC cryptography (based on plain Galois fields) to provide ...

, especially work on the ECDLP. He has also worked on

pairing-based cryptography Pairing-based cryptography is the use of a pairing between elements of two cryptographic groups to a third group with a mapping e :G_1 \times G_2 \to G_T to construct or analyze cryptographic systems. Definition The following definition is commonl ...

contributing a number of algorithms such as the SK-KEM and the Ate-pairing Smart carries out research on a wide variety of topics in cryptography. He has been instrumental in the effort to make secure multiparty computation practical. A few of his works in this direction include. His work with Gentry and Halevi on performing the first large calculation using Fully Homomorphic Encryption won the IBM '' Pat Goldberg Best Paper Award'' for 2012. In addition to his three years at HP Laboratories, Smart was a founder of the startup Identum specialising in pairing based cryptography and identity based encryption. This was bought by

Trend Micro is an American-Japanese multinational cyber security software company with global headquarters in Tokyo, Japan and Irving, Texas, United State.Other regional headquarters and R&D centers are located around East Asia, Southeast Asia, Europe, and ...

in 2008. In 2013 he formed, with

Yehuda Lindell Yehuda Lindell (born 24 February 1971) is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at Bar-Ilan University where he conducts research on cryptography with a focus on the theory of secure computation and its application in practice. Lindell ...

, Unbound Security (formally called Dyadic Security), a company focusing on deploying distributed cryptographic solutions based on multi-party computations. Unbound Security was bought by Coinbase in 2021. He is also the co-founder, along with Kenny Paterson, of the Real World Crypto conference series.

Publications

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References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Smart, Nigel 1967 births Living people Alumni of the University of Reading Alumni of the University of Kent Erasmus University Rotterdam faculty Academics of Cardiff University Academics of the University of Kent Academics of the University of Bristol Hewlett-Packard people Modern cryptographers English computer scientists Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award holders