Rijndael was the surprise winner of the contest for the new Advanced En- cryption Standard (AES) for the United States. This contest was organized and run by the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) be- ginning in January 1997; Rijndael was announced as the winner in October 2000. It was the "surprise winner" because many observers (and even some participants) expressed scepticism that the D.S. government would adopt as an encryption standard any algorithm that was not designed by D.S. citizens. Yet NIST ran an open, international, selection process that should serve as...