Vincent Rijmen wins Levchin Prize for Real-World Cryptography 2023

Professor Vincent Rijmen wins the Levchin Prize for Real-World Cryptography 2023 for his "many contributions to the design of symmetric ciphers, most notably AES".

The Levchin prize honors major innovations in cryptography that have had a significant impact on the practice of cryptography and its use in real-world systems.

The Belgian Prof. Vincent Rijmen received on Monday, March 27th the 2023 Levchin prize for his many contributions to the field, at the Real World Cryptography Conference, Tokyo, Japan, 2023.

He is known in the first place as designers of Rijndael, which was elected as the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) in 2000. Nowadays AES is used worldwide to secure the Internet, WiFi, and communication via cell phones, smartcards, payments, etc. This is the reason why all modern PC processors include special circuitry to accelerate AES. 

Prof. Rijmen was involved in several other cryptographic developments that are relevant in real-world systems. He contributed to a mechanism used by the Galileo satellites to secure their navigation signals against hackers and foreign services. He invented the Threshold Implementation (TI) method that is used by large manufacturers like NXP to secure their smartcards. An important contribution at academic level is the book on Rijndael that he wrote with his colleague. Thousands of researchers and developers all over the world to learn from this book the principles of modern cryptographic design. Prof. Rijmen accepts this award as an encouragement to continue his work on the development of a real-cryptography world, where citizens can rest assured that they are in control of their data and that their “smart” devices are protected against criminal hackers.

Vincent Rijmen is a full professor with KU Leuven, Belgium and an adjunct professor with University of Bergen, Norway.