About me

My name is Novak Kaluđerović. Kolja [kolya] is my nickname.

I am an applied cryptographer. I have worked in academia and industry on the design, implementation, and cryptanalysis of cryptographic protocols.

In 2026, Donald Knuth acknowledged a correction I found in The Art of Computer Programming, Volume II. The fix is now a named result, Theorem B (N. Kaluđerović, 2026), confirmed for the 53rd printing. [blog post in progress]

I defended my PhD in mathematics and computer science at the LACAL lab of École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland, under the supervision of Arjen Lenstra. In the last year of my PhD I was a member of LASEC where I was supervised by Serge Vaudenay. After my PhD I worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Cybersecurity lab of University of St. Gallen.

Previously I was a master and bachelor student of mathematics at Sapienza - Università di Roma, in Italy.

Interests

My main interests lie in secure, fast and side-channel resistant implementations of cryptographic protocols. I am passionate about coding in C, and working on low-level and high-efficiency implementations. Further interests include algebraic and computational number theory, lattice-based post-quantum cryptography, zero-knowledge proof systems, verifiable computation, and the theory of quantum computing and quantum algorithms.

Various research and personal projects:

• Prime field library - [link]
  A C++ library for arithmetic over prime fields.
• Finite field library - [link]
  Constant-time selected finite fields in C and ARM assembly.
• Arithmetic library - [link]
  An arithmetic library written in Rust -- In progress.
• Legendre dOPRF - [link]
  Implementation of the MPC Legendre dOPRF in C and ARM assembly.
• Apple ARM implementation of CSIDH - [link]
  Apple ARM arithmetic implementation for CSIDH.
• Sumcheck protocol - [link]
  A toy implementation of the Sumcheck protocol in Rust.
• Legendre PRF attack - [link]
  Key recovery attack of the Legendre PRF, written in C with gmp.
• SIKE power analysis attack - [link]
  A power analysis attack on SIKE in C and Python.
• SIKE zero-value attack - [link]
  A power analysis attack on SIKE in C and Python.

Contact

• E-mail:   nk@kolja.rs
• Github:   github.com/nkKolja
• Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/nk-kolja