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. In 2016 he was named as a Fellow of the IACR.
Smart carries out research on a wide variety of topics in cryptography. Smart is known for his work in elliptic curve cryptography. He has also worked on pairing-based cryptography contributing a number of algorithms such as the SK-KEM and the Ate-pairing. His work with Gentry and Halevi on performing the first large calculation using Fully Homomorphic Encryption won the IBM Pat Goldberg Best Paper Award for 2012. In the last decade he has worked on making secure multiparty computation practical.
In addition to his three years at HP Laboratories, Smart was a founder of the startup Identum, which was bought by Trend Micro in 2008. In 2013 he formed, with Yehuda Lindell, Unbound Security, which was sold to Coinbase in 2022. He is also the co-founder, along with Kenny Paterson, of the Real World Cryptography conference series.
Smart has held a Royal Society Wolfson Merit Award, and two ERC Advanced Grant. He was Vice President of the International Association for Cryptologic Research (2014-2016). In 2016 he was named as a Fellow of the IACR.
Smart was a founder of the startup Identum, which was bought by Trend Micro in 2008. In 2013 he co-founded Unbound Security, which was sold to Coinbase in 2022. He is also the co-founder, along with Kenny Paterson, of the Real World Cryptography conference series.