Paul is a cryptographer and computer security researcher, and is currently a professor of computer science at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario. He previously held a Canada Research Chair in authentication and computer security and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (FRSC). Along with Alfred Menezes and Scott Vanstone, Paul was a co-author of the Handbook of Applied Cryptography, and the author of Computer Security and the Internet. In 2000, he was awarded The J.W. Graham Medal in Computing Innovation, and a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery in 2016 for his "contributions to applied cryptography, authentication and computer security.