Interview with Vincent Rijmen, 18th Frontiers of Knowledge Award in ICT

The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Information and Communication Technologies category has gone in this eighteenth edition to Professors Joan Daemen and Vincent Rijmen “for the design of cryptographic technologies, and in particular AES, the algorithm that has become the international standard used in billions of connected devices globally”. 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. Learn more: https://www.frontiersofknowledgeawards-fbbva.es/galardonados/joan-daemen-2/ Questions: 00:00 Introduction 00:14 What is the Rijndael algorithm, and what was your specific contribution to its creation? 1:05 Why did the Rijndael algorithm become the Advanced Encryption Standard, and how has it managed to keep that status to this day? 1:52 Where is this algorithm used nowadays and why is it important for the security of our digital society? 2:39 In an era where quantum computers are getting larger and more powerful, to what extent will it be necessary to update the encryption standard of our devices? #ict #cryptography