Nigel Smart (cryptographer)

Nigel Smart is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Bristol and a past holder of the Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award. He is a cryptographer with expertise in the theory of cryptography and its application in practice.^[1][2]

Education

Smart received a BSc degree in 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 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. Since 2000 he has been at the University of Bristol, and he heads the cryptology research group there.

Smart held a Royal Society Wolfson Merit Award (2008–2013), and an ERC Advanced Grant (2011–2016). He is a director of the International Association of Cryptologic Research (2012–2014), and has been elected Vice President for the period 2014-2017.^[3] In 2016 he was named as a Fellow of the IACR.^[4]

Research

Prof. Smart is best known for his work in elliptic curve cryptography, especially work on the ECDLP.^[5][6][7] He has also worked on pairing-based cryptography contributing a number of algorithms such as the SK-KEM^[8] and the Ate-pairing^[9]

Smart carries out research on a wide variety of topics in cryptography. Recently, he has been instrumental in the effort to make secure multiparty computation practical. A few of his works in this direction include.^[10][11][12]

His work with Gentry and Halevi on performing the first large calculation using Fully Homomomorphic Encryption^[13] won the IBM Pat Goldberg Best Paper Award for 2012.^[14]

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 in 2008.^[15] In 2013 he formed, with Yehuda Lindell, Dyadic Security, a company focusing on deploying distributed cryptographic solutions based on multi-party computations.

Publications

• Nigel P. Smart (1998). The Algorithmic Resolution of Diophantine Equations. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-64633-2. 
• Ian F. Blake, Gadiel Seroussi and Nigel P. Smart (1999). Elliptic Curves in Cryptography. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-65374-6. 
• Nigel P. Smart (2002). Cryptography An Introduction. McGraw Hill. ISBN 0-07-709987-7. 
• I.F. Blake; G. Seroussi & Nigel P. Smart (2004). Advances in Elliptic Curve Cryptography. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-60415-X. 
• Nigel P. Smart (editor) (2005). Cryptography and Coding. Springer-Verlag, LNCS 3796. ISBN 3-540-30276-X. 
• Nigel P. Smart (editor) (2008). Advances in Cryptology - Eurocrypt 2008. Springer-Verlag, LNCS 4965. ISBN 978-3-540-78966-6. 
• Daniel Page & Nigel P. Smart (2014). What Is Computer Science? An Information Security Perspective. Springer-Verlag. ISBN 978-3-319-04041-7. 

References