Vincent Rijmen

Who is Vincent Rijmen?

Vincent Rijmen is a Belgian cryptographer and one of the two designers of the Rijndael, the Advanced Encryption Standard. Rijmen is also the co-designer of the WHIRLPOOL cryptographic hash function, and the block ciphers Anubis, KHAZAD, Square, NOEKEON and SHARK.

In 1993, Rijmen obtained a degree in electronics engineering at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. Afterwards, he was a PhD student at the ESAT/COSIC lab of the K.U.Leuven. In 1997, Rijmen finished his doctoral dissertation titled Cryptanalysis and design of iterated block ciphers.

After his PhD he did postdoctoral work at the COSIC lab, on several occasions collaborating with Joan Daemen. One of their joint projects resulted in the algorithm Rijndael, which in October 2000 was selected by the National Institute for Standards and Technology to become the Advanced Encryption Standard.

Since 1 August 2001, Rijmen has been working as chief cryptographer with Cryptomathic. From 2001–2003, Rijmen was a visiting professor at the Institute for Applied Information Processing and Communications at Graz University of Technology, and a full professor there from 2004–2007.