Nigel Smart is a professor at
COSIC at the
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
KU Leuven (or Katholieke Universiteit Leuven) is a Catholic research university in the city of Leuven, Belgium. It conducts teaching, research, and services in computer science, engineering, natural sciences, theology, humanities, medicine, l ...
. He is a cryptographer with expertise in the theory of cryptography and its application in practice.
Education
Smart received a
BSc degree
A Bachelor of Science (BS, BSc, SB, or ScB; from the Latin ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for programs that generally last three to five years.
The first university to admit a student to the degree of Bachelor of Science was the University of ...
in
mathematics
Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics ...
from the
University of Reading in 1989. He then obtained his
PhD degree from the
University of Kent at
Canterbury in 1992; his thesis was titled ''The Computer Solutions of Diophantine Equations''.
Career
Smart proceeded to work as a
research fellow at the University of Kent, the
Erasmus University Rotterdam, and
Cardiff University
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, caption = Coat of arms of Cardiff University
, motto = cy, Gwirionedd, Undod a Chytgord
, mottoeng = Truth, Unity and Concord
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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
The Hewlett-Packard Company, commonly shortened to Hewlett-Packard ( ) or HP, was an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Palo Alto, California. HP developed and provided a wide variety of hardware components ...
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 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 (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, especially work on the
ECDLP. He has also worked on
pairing-based cryptography 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
HP Labs is the exploratory and advanced research group for HP Inc. HP Labs' headquarters is in Palo Alto, California and the group has research and development facilities in Bristol, UK. The development of programmable desktop calculators, ink ...
, Smart was a founder of the startup
Identum specialising in pairing based cryptography and identity based encryption. This was bought by
Trend Micro in 2008. In 2013 he formed, with
Yehuda 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 Kenneth G. "Kenny" Paterson (born 2 March 1969) is a professor in the Institute of Information Security at ETH Zurich, where he leads the Applied Cryptography Group. Before joining ETH Zurich in April 2019, he was a professor in the Information Secu ...
, 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