Paul C. van Oorschot is a cryptographer and computer security researcher, currently a professor of computer science at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, where he held a Canada Research Chair in authentication and computer security over the period 2002-2023. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (FRSC). He is best known as a co-author of the Handbook of Applied Cryptography (ISBN 0-8493-8523-7), together with Alfred Menezes and Scott Vanstone. He is also the author of Computer Security and the Internet: Tools and Jewels from Malware to Bitcoin (ISBN 978-3-030-83410-4). Van Oorschot was awarded the 2000 J.W. Graham Medal in Computing Innovation.^[1] He also helped organize the first Selected Areas in Cryptography (SAC) workshop in 1994.

Van Oorschot received his Ph.D. in 1988 from the University of Waterloo. He was recognized (2016) as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery^[2] for "contributions to applied cryptography, authentication and computer security."^[3] He is also a Fellow of the IEEE (2019). His most recent book is Computer Security and the Internet: Tools and Jewels from Malware to Bitcoin (2nd edition, 2021; Springer International).