Vincent Rijmen was born in 1970, in a small town called Leuven, close to Brussels, Belgium. In 1993, he obtained a degree in electronics engineering at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (K.U. Leuven). Afterwards, he was a PhD. student at rhe ESAT/COSIC lab of the K.U. Leuven. (COSIC stands for COmputer Security and Industrial Cryptography.) In 1997, Vincent finished his doctoral dissertation titled "Cryptanalysis and design of iterated block ciphers."

Since that time, he has been a postdoctoral researcher at the COSIC lab, headed by Prof. Bart Preneel and Prof. Joos Vandewalle. Vincent's research (including the work on Rijndael) has been sponsored by the Fund for Scientific Research - Flanders (Belgium).

Starting with a practical implementation of an attack on a reduced version of the DES, Vincent's favorite research topic has always been the design and cryptanalysis of block ciphers. He also studies other symmetric cryptographic primitives, such as MAC algorithms and hash functions, and he has evaluated numerous industrially fielded computer security systems (e-banking, file encryption, etc.).

When not doing cryptography, Vincent can be found experimenting with Linux, meeting with the Boy Scouts or playing adventure games.