Residence United Kingdom Name Nigel Smart Fields Cryptography | Role Professor Education University of Kent | |
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Born 22 October 1967 (age 56)
United Kingdom ( 1967-10-22 ) Alma mater University of Reading (BSc)
University of Kent (PhD) Known for ECC
Work on the ECDLP problem
Pairing-based cryptography
Efficient Secure multi-party computation
Fully Homomorphic Encryption Books Cryptography: An Introduction, Elliptic Curves in Cryptography, What Is Computer Science, The Algorithmic Resolutio | ||
Institutions University of Bristol Doctoral advisor John M. Merriman | ||
3rd biu winter school on cryptography the basics of elliptic curves nigel smart
Nigel Smart is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Bristol. He is a cryptographer with expertise in the theory of cryptography and its application in practice.
Contents
- 3rd biu winter school on cryptography the basics of elliptic curves nigel smart
- 3rd biu winter school on cryptography the discrete log problem on elliptic curves nigel smart
- Education
- Career
- Research
- Publications
- References
3rd biu winter school on cryptography the discrete log problem on elliptic curves nigel smart
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 two ERC Advanced Grant (2011–2016 and 2016-2021). He was a director of the International Association of 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. Recently, 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 Homomomorphic 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 in 2008. In 2013 he formed, with Yehuda Lindell, Dyadic Security, a company focusing on deploying distributed cryptographic solutions based on multi-party computations. He is also the co-founder, along with Kenny Paterson, of the Real World Cryptography conference series.