I sent a cold email to the co-creator of AES in January 2026.
If you do not know what that means: AES is the encryption standard used by every government, every bank, every cloud provider on earth. It protects classified military communications. It secures your iCloud backup. It is the single most important cipher in human history.
The man who designed it — Vincent Rijmen, together with Joan Daemen — works at KU Leuven in Belgium. He runs the COSIC research group. He is, by any measure, one of the five most important cryptographers alive.
I wrote to him from a flat in Kielce, Poland. No institutional affiliation. No PhD. No research lab. Just a system I built and an honest description of what it did.
The email described two layers. ChaCha20-Poly1305 on the inside — 256-bit authenticated encryption. A keyed Glyph Rotor on the outside — HMAC-based position-dependent encoding across 133,387 Unicode characters.
I explained that the layers were independently keyed. That breaking one gave you nothing useful without the other. That the output looked like multilingual text, not ciphertext.
I told him I came from affiliate marketing, not academia. I told him I built systems that had to work invisibly across 200 countries. I told him I thought that background led me to ask a question that traditional cryptographers had not asked.
I did not expect a reply.
He replied.
He reviewed the architecture. He examined both layers independently. He looked at the threat model and the claims.
His assessment: “I don’t see any weakness in Layer 1 and Layer 2. In fact, I believe them to be strong and secure with respect to the current state of the art.”
I read that sentence five times.
I need to be honest about what this felt like.
I have spent years building things that nobody validated. Projects that existed in my head, on my servers, in code that only I understood. The Polyglottal Cipher was designed in hotel rooms and airports during years when I was drinking too much and holding too little together.
To have the person who designed the encryption standard that protects the entire internet tell you that your architecture is strong and secure — that is not a business milestone. That is a moment where years of solitary work suddenly have a witness.
I am not going to pretend I did not cry.
The validation does not make the system perfect. Prof. Rijmen was careful and specific. He validated Layers 1 and 2. He did not say it was unbreakable — nothing is. He said he did not see a weakness.
That is exactly the right kind of validation. Not hype. Not a marketing quote. A specific technical assessment from the most qualified person alive to give one.
What changed after that email is not the system. The code did not change. The architecture did not change.
What changed is that I stopped wondering whether I was building something real.
I am building something real.
The patent is filed. The IACR submission is in progress. The system is live across fifteen sites. The automated audit passes seventeen of seventeen checks.
And the co-creator of AES said it is strong.
I think about that email at strange moments. When Austin is playing and I am watching from the arched window. When the servers are quiet and the mesh is replicating and I can see the infrastructure running across three continents from my desk in Kielce.
Not because it proved anything. Because it confirmed something I already knew but was afraid to say out loud.
I built something that works. And someone who would know told me so.
Sometimes that is all you need.