BIO
Vincent Rijmen (Leuven, Belgium, 1970), holds an electronics engineering degree from KU Leuven. He obtained his PhD in 1997 while studying with the Computer Security and Industrial Cryptography group (COSIC) in the same university’s Department of Electrical Engineering (ESAT), and continued to research there until 2001, when he moved to Graz University of Technology (Austria) to take up an appointment as Professor of Applied Cryptology. In 2007, he returned to KU Leuven, where he is currently a full professor attached to COSIC and the ESAT Department Chair, combining these positions with that of Adjunct Professor at the Selmer Center for Secure Communication at the University of Bergen (Norway). He has authored some 280 publications including three books, and is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Cryptology as well as a past editor of Information Processing Letters, IET Information Security, and Designs, Codes and Cryptography. Program Co-Chair at Eurocrypt 2018 and 2019 and other international conferences, he also served as Program Director on KU Leuven’s Master in Electrical Engineering. Among other distinctions, he is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the International Association for Cryptologic Research.
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.
