The Belgian block cipher Rijndael was chosen in 2000 by the U.S. governments National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to be the successor to the Data Encryption Standard. Rijndael was subsequently standardized as the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), which is potentially the worlds most important block cipher. In 2002, some new analytical techniques were suggested that may have a dramatic effect on the security of the AES. Existing analytical techniques for block ciphers depend heavily on a statistical approach, whereas these new techniques are algebraic in nature.