Nigel Smart (cryptographer)

Nigel Smart
Born	22 October 1967 United Kingdom
Residence	United Kingdom
Fields	Cryptography
Institutions	University of Bristol
Alma mater	University of Reading (BSc) University of Kent (PhD)
Doctoral advisor	John Merriman
Known for	ECC Work on the ECDLP problem Pairing-based cryptography Efficient Secure multi-party computation Fully Homomorphic Encryption
Website www.cs.bris.ac.uk/~nigel

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, and 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 and Nigel P. Smart (2014). What Is Computer Science? An Information Security Perspective. Springer-Verlag. ISBN 978-3-319-04041-7.

References

1. Nigel Smart's publications indexed by the DBLP Bibliography Server at the University of Trier
2. Nigel Smart's publications indexed by Google Scholar, a service provided by Google
3. "IACR Election 2013 - List of Candidates and Propositions". Iacr.org. Retrieved 2015-08-14.
4. "IACR Fellows 2016".
5. S. D. Galbraith and N. P. Smart, A cryptographic application of the Weil descent, Cryptography and Coding, 1999.
6. P. Gaudry, F. Hess, and N. P. Smart, Constructive and destructive facets of Weil descent on elliptic curves, Hewlett Packard Laboratories Technical Report, 2000.
7. N. Smart, The discrete logarithm problem on elliptic curves of trace one, Journal of Cryptology, Volume 12, 1999.
8. Barbosa et. al, SK-KEM: An Identity-Based KEM
9. F. Hess, N. Smart, F. Vercauteren. The Eta-pairing revisited. In IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, Vol. 52(10), p. 4595-4602, 2006.
10. B. Pinkas, T. Schneider, N. P. Smart and S. C. Williams. Secure two-party computation is practical, ASIACRYPT 2009
11. I. Damgard, V. Pastro, N. P. Smart, and S. Zakarias. Multiparty computation from somewhat homomorphic encryption, CRYPTO 2012.
12. I. Damgard, M. Keller, E. Larraia, C. Miles and N. P. Smart. Implementing AES via an Actively/Covertly Secure Dishonest-Majority MPC Protocol, SCN 2012.
13. C. Gentry, S. Halevi and N. P. Smart. Homomorphic Evaluation of the AES Circuit CRYPTO 2012.
14. "Pat Goldberg Memorial 2012 Best Papers in CS, EE and Math - IBM". Researcher.watson.ibm.com. 2015-03-23. Retrieved 2015-08-14.
15. "Trend Micro buys into encryption with Identum purchase | News". Geek.com. 2008-02-27. Retrieved 2015-08-14.