For 3 years, a digital demolition derby pitted teams of cryptographers against each other in a fierce battle of different schemes for protecting information from prying eyes.
Now, there is only one survivor: a data-scrambling technique called Rijndael (pronounced RHINE-doll). The name is patched together from those of its Belgian inventors, computer scientists Vincent Rijmen of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Heverlee, Belgium, and Joan Daemen of Proton World International in Brussels, which develops smart-card technology.