Joan Daemen

Who is Joan Daemen?

Joan Daemen is a Belgian cryptographer who co-designed the Rijndael cipher with Vincent Rijmen, which was selected as the Advanced Encryption Standard in 2001. More recently, he co-designed the Keccak cryptographic hash, which was selected as the new SHA-3 hash by NIST in October 2012. He has also designed or co-designed the MMB, Square, SHARK, NOEKEON, 3-Way, and BaseKing block ciphers.

In 1988, Daemen graduated in electro-mechanical engineering at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. He subsequently joined the COSIC research group, and has worked on the design and cryptanalysis of block ciphers, stream ciphers and cryptographic hash functions. Daemen completed his PhD in 1995, at which point he worked for a year at Janssen Pharmaceutica in Beerse, Belgium. He subsequently worked at the BACOB bank, Banksys, Proton World and then STMicroelectronics.