BIO
Joan Daemen (Achel, Limburg, Belgium, 1965) qualified as a Civil Engineer, Electronics at KU Leuven (Belgium), before going on to earn a PhD with the Computer Security and Industrial Cryptography (COSIC) research group at the same university in 1995. After a brief period at pharmaceuticals firm Janssen, he switched track to security engineering and architecture, firstly at Bacob Bank (1996) and then at Banksys (1996-1998), Proton World (1998-2003), and STMicroelectronics (2003-2018), where he was principal cryptographer. In 2015, he joined Radboud University (Nijmegen, The Netherlands) as Professor of Symmetric Cryptography in the Digital Security Group, which he has headed since 2019. His recent work includes the ESCADA project on the foundations of security in symmetric cryptography, funded with an ERC advanced grant, and the SCALAR project looking at the design of symmetric crypto optimally exploiting available multipliers, funded with a TOP Grant from the Dutch Research Council (NWO). Daemen will co-chair the scientific program of Eurocrypt 2026.
CONTRIBUTION
Daemen and Rijmen created an algorithm they called Rijndael, a portmanteau of their names, to encrypt confidential information, and which replaced the previous standard, fallen into obsolescence. In 2001, they won the National Institute of Standards and Technology competition, launched by the American governmen, so Rijndael became the new international standard —known as Advanced Encryption Standard, or AES— used to this day.
The security and, above all, the speed of the algorithm were the decisive factors that led to its selection. To achieve an even higher speed, Rijndael, it is commonly integrated into the chips of the devices that protect our data and communications on a daily basis, be they computers, mobile phones, Wi-Fi access points or even remote-controlled doors and windows.
The winning algorithm has also proven to be secure against attacks from a sufficiently powerful quantum computer. This threat was already anticipated in the 1990s and incorporated into its security. However, another type of cryptography, known as public key cryptography, which is used, for instance, in electronic signatures, will need to be changed, and in 2024 three standards were chosen for this purpose.
