Learn a bit more about Rijndael. This friday's interview is related to cryptography. We'll discover Rijndael with AES author, Vincent Rijmen
Raphaël Bauduin - First and traditional question : Please present yourself.
Vincent Rijmen - I'm Vincent Rijmen. I was born in Leuven, a small town in Belgium. I have
lived there
all my life, except for 6 months in Norway. I studied applied sciences at
the (Flemish) university of Leuven.
RB - When did you start work on Rijmen? You were not alone?
VR - Rijmen is my name. Rijndael is the name of the algorithm.
Rijndael can be seen as the logical consequence of two PhD dissertations:
Joan Daemen's,
which was written in '95, and mine, which was written in '97. If you take
the PhD's into
account, we started cooperating in '93. But we knew we were going to submit
it to the
AES only in '98.
RB - What were the design points you focused on ?
VR - The main point is to get something which is secure according to the state
of the art
in cryptography. We tried to get security by using simple constructions.
The main advantage of simple constructions is that it becomes easy to
reason about them, allowing to investigate the security more easily.
Secondly, you get some kind of `beauty' and
mathematical elegance.
As a side bonus, we got high performance and flexibility.
RB - Did you hope to win the AES contest? There were propositions by really
big corporations ...
VR - Hoping is for free, we say here. We certainly didn't anticipate winning
when we started.
But we're not afraid of big corporations.
RB - Do you develop Rijmen further ?
VR - You mean Rijndael, I guess ;-)
It has been standardized now, so the input/output behaviour has to remain
fixed.
I look at efficient implementations every now and then.
RB - What did winning the AES contest change in your life ?
VR - Almost nothing. Sometimes a few people want to shake my hand, who wouldn't
have before.
RB - How do you envision the future of cryptography ?
VR - It will continue to grow, but slowly, because not many people want to do
the mathematics.
RB - What is your dayjob now? Is it related to Rijndael ?
VR - I'm chief cryptographer at Cryptomathic. Which means I'm still doing
cryptography, but Rijndael is finished now.
RB - Can you tell us where Rijmen was already implemented and used ?
VR - That's a really long list.
RB - What do you expect from FOSDEM ?
VR - I'm still thinking about what I can tell to you, because I don't want to
bore people with mathematics.
You can discuss about Vincent's interview in our forum.
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