Gilles Van Assche
More info
- Affiliation
- STMicroelectronics
- Known for
- Keccak (SHA-3)
Belgian cryptographer and one quarter of the Keccak team, whose sponge construction won NIST's hash competition and became SHA-3.
Keccak was designed by Guido Bertoni, Joan Daemen, Michaël Peeters and Van Assche, most of them at STMicroelectronics. It was named the winner in October 2012 and standardised as SHA-3 in FIPS 202 three years later. The novelty was the sponge: instead of Merkle–Damgård's chain of compressions, input is absorbed into a large internal state and then squeezed out at whatever length you like.
Van Assche's doctorate was in quantum cryptography, and his book Quantum Cryptography and Secret-Key Distillation (2006) covers extracting a secret key from noisy quantum channels. The team has since produced faster relatives such as KangarooTwelve and Xoodoo — cryptographers who won a competition and didn't take that as a reason to stop.