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 Merit Award.
Education
Smart received a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics from the University of Reading in 1989. He then obtained his Doctor of Philosophy degree from the University of Kent at Canterbury in 1992. His thesis was titled The Computer Solutions of Diophantine Equations.
Career
He is a cryptographer with expertise in the theory of cryptography and its application in practice. 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 European Research Council Advanced Grant (2011–2016). He is a director of the International Association of Cryptologic (2012–2014), and has been elected Vice President for the period 2014-2017.
Professor 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 Saskatchewan-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. 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. Publications Blake, Gadiel Seroussi and Seroussi, and X. X. Daniel Page and