Nigel Smart | |
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Born | |
Alma mater |
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Known for | ECC Work on the ECDLP problem Pairing-based cryptography Efficient Secure multi-party computation Fully homomorphic encryption |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Cryptography |
Institutions | Katholieke Universiteit Leuven |
Doctoral advisor | John Merriman |
Website | nigelsmart |
Nigel Smart is a professor at COSIC at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and Chief Academic Officer at Zama. [1] He is a cryptographer with interests in the theory of cryptography and its application in practice. [2] [3]
Smart received a BSc degree in mathematics from the University of Reading in 1989.[ citation needed ] He then obtained his PhD degree [ citation needed ] from the University of Kent at Canterbury in 1992; his thesis was titled The Computer Solutions of Diophantine Equations.
Smart proceeded to work as a research fellow at the University of Kent, the Erasmus University Rotterdam, and Cardiff University until 1995.[ citation needed ] 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. 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. [4] In 2016 he was named as a Fellow of the IACR. [5]
Prof. Smart is best known for his work in elliptic curve cryptography, especially work on the ECDLP. [6] [7] [8] He has also worked on pairing-based cryptography contributing a number of algorithms such as the SK-KEM [9] and the Ate-pairing [10]
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. [11] [12] [13]
His work with Gentry and Halevi on performing the first large calculation using Fully Homomorphic Encryption [14] won the IBM Pat Goldberg Best Paper Award for 2012. [15]
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. [16] 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. [17] He is also the co-founder, along with Kenny Paterson, of the Real World Crypto conference series. [18]
Elliptic-curve cryptography (ECC) is an approach to public-key cryptography based on the algebraic structure of elliptic curves over finite fields. ECC allows smaller keys to provide equivalent security, compared to cryptosystems based on modular exponentiation in Galois fields, such as the RSA cryptosystem and ElGamal cryptosystem.
The International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR) is a non-profit scientific organization that furthers research in cryptology and related fields. The IACR was organized at the initiative of David Chaum at the CRYPTO '82 conference.
The Diffie–Hellman problem (DHP) is a mathematical problem first proposed by Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman in the context of cryptography and serves as the theoretical basis of the Diffie–Hellman key exchange and its derivatives. The motivation for this problem is that many security systems use one-way functions: mathematical operations that are fast to compute, but hard to reverse. For example, they enable encrypting a message, but reversing the encryption is difficult. If solving the DHP were easy, these systems would be easily broken.
Alfred Menezes is co-author of several books on cryptography, including the Handbook of Applied Cryptography, and is a professor of mathematics at the University of Waterloo in Canada.
Homomorphic encryption is a form of encryption that allows computations to be performed on encrypted data without first having to decrypt it. The resulting computations are left in an encrypted form which, when decrypted, result in an output that is identical to that produced had the operations been performed on the unencrypted data. Homomorphic encryption can be used for privacy-preserving outsourced storage and computation. This allows data to be encrypted and outsourced to commercial cloud environments for processing, all while encrypted.
Victor Saul Miller is an American mathematician as a Principal Computer Scientist in the Computer Science Laboratory of SRI International. He received his B.A. in mathematics from Columbia University in 1968, and his Ph.D. in mathematics from Harvard University in 1975. He was an assistant professor in the Mathematics Department of the University of Massachusetts Boston from 1973 to 1978. In 1978 he joined the IBM 801 project in the Computer Science Department of the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, and moved to the Mathematics Department in 1984. From 1993-2022 he was on the Research Staff of Center for Communications Research (CCR) of the Institute for Defense Analyses in Princeton, New Jersey, U.S. In 2022 he was a Research Scientist in the Statistics and Privacy Group of Meta Platforms.
A threshold cryptosystem, the basis for the field of threshold cryptography, is a cryptosystem that protects information by encrypting it and distributing it among a cluster of fault-tolerant computers. The message is encrypted using a public key, and the corresponding private key is shared among the participating parties. With a threshold cryptosystem, in order to decrypt an encrypted message or to sign a message, several parties must cooperate in the decryption or signature protocol.
In cryptography, a key encapsulation mechanism, or KEM, is a public-key cryptosystem that allows a sender to generate a short secret key and transmit it to a receiver securely, in spite of eavesdropping and intercepting adversaries.
Lattice-based cryptography is the generic term for constructions of cryptographic primitives that involve lattices, either in the construction itself or in the security proof. Lattice-based constructions support important standards of post-quantum cryptography. Unlike more widely used and known public-key schemes such as the RSA, Diffie-Hellman or elliptic-curve cryptosystems — which could, theoretically, be defeated using Shor's algorithm on a quantum computer — some lattice-based constructions appear to be resistant to attack by both classical and quantum computers. Furthermore, many lattice-based constructions are considered to be secure under the assumption that certain well-studied computational lattice problems cannot be solved efficiently.
Post-quantum cryptography (PQC), sometimes referred to as quantum-proof, quantum-safe, or quantum-resistant, is the development of cryptographic algorithms that are thought to be secure against a cryptanalytic attack by a quantum computer. Most widely-used public-key algorithms rely on the difficulty of one of three mathematical problems: the integer factorization problem, the discrete logarithm problem or the elliptic-curve discrete logarithm problem. All of these problems could be easily solved on a sufficiently powerful quantum computer running Shor's algorithm or even faster and less demanding alternatives.
Mordechai M. "Moti" Yung is a cryptographer and computer scientist known for his work on cryptovirology and kleptography.
Yehuda Lindell is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at Bar-Ilan University where he conducts research on cryptography with a focus on the theory of secure computation and its application in practice. Lindell currently leads the cryptography team at Coinbase.
Shai Halevi is a computer scientist who works on cryptography research at Amazon Web Services.
Jung Hee Cheon is a South Korean cryptographer and mathematician whose research interest includes computational number theory, cryptography, and information security. He is one of the inventors of braid cryptography, one of group-based cryptography, and approximate homomorphic encryption HEAAN. As one of co-inventors of approximate homomorphic encryption HEaaN, he is actively working on homomorphic encryptions and their applications including machine learning, homomorphic control systems, and DNA computation on encrypted data. He is particularly known for his work on an efficient algorithm on strong DH problem. He received the best paper award in Asiacrypt 2008 for improving Pollard rho algorithm, and the best paper award in Eurocrypt 2015 for attacking Multilinear Maps. He was also selected as Scientist of the month by Korean government in 2018 and won the POSCO TJ Park Prize in 2019.
Ran Canetti is a professor of Computer Science at Boston University. and the director of the Check Point Institute for Information Security and of the Center for Reliable Information System and Cyber Security. He is also associate editor of the Journal of Cryptology and Information and Computation. His main areas of research span cryptography and information security, with an emphasis on the design, analysis and use of cryptographic protocols.
Homomorphic Encryption library or HElib is a free and open-source cross platform software developed by IBM that implements various forms of homomorphic encryption.
Hugo Krawczyk is an Argentine-Israeli cryptographer best known for co-inventing the HMAC message authentication algorithm and contributing in fundamental ways to the cryptographic architecture of central Internet standards, including IPsec, IKE, and SSL/TLS. In particular, both IKEv2 and TLS 1.3 use Krawczyk’s SIGMA protocol as the cryptographic core of their key exchange procedures. He has also contributed foundational work in the areas of threshold and proactive cryptosystems and searchable symmetric encryption, among others.
PALISADE is an open-source cross platform software library that provides implementations of lattice cryptography building blocks and homomorphic encryption schemes.
An oblivious pseudorandom function (OPRF) is a cryptographic function, similar to a keyed-hash function, but with the distinction that in an OPRF two parties cooperate to securely compute a pseudorandom function (PRF).
Çetin Kaya Koç is a cryptographic engineer, author, and academic. His research interests include cryptographic engineering, finite field arithmetic, random number generators, homomorphic encryption, and machine learning.