Nicolas is a cryptologist and a Senior Lecturer at University College London.

He has done his PhD thesis in cryptology at Paris 6 University. Then for 7 years he worked as a cryptologist at the biggest secure hardware manufacturer in the world Gemalto.

He is a highly influential code-breaker and author of more than 60 regular publications. He has more than 3700 citations and his h-index is 29. In June 2003 New Scientist put a title ‘Cipher Crisis’ on the first page and dedicated a 4-pages paper to his research about the security of ciphers, the so called Algebraic Cryptanalysis and the U.S. encryption standard AES.

In 2006 he joined University College London. His research focuses on the security analysis of cryptographic schemes with particular focus on realistic attack scenarios where the amount of data available to the attacker is very low. He is responsible for the cryptanalysis of many real-life ciphers used by hundreds of hundreds of millions of people every day, such as the Bluetooth cipher E0, the automobile cipher KeeLoq and the MiFare Classic Crypto-1 system which is used in public transportation and building access control.

He has filed 8 patents on industrial applications of cryptology, smart cards and side-channel attacks. He has co-authored several research papers on bitcoin.