Gilles Van Assche is a Belgian cryptographer who co-designed the Keccak cryptographic hash, which was selected as the new SHA-3 hash by NIST in October 2012. The SHA-3 standard was released by NIST on August 5, 2015. Along with Joan Daemen and he designed the NOEKEON family of block ciphers which were submitted to the NESSIE project in September 2000. In 2006 joined the team and together they designed the RadioGatún hash function and stream cipher, introduced the concept of cryptographic sponge functions and designed the Keccak sponge function which later became the SHA-3 standard.