In a recent paper, Nicolas Courtois and Josef Pieprzyk show that Rijndael can be written as an overdefined system of multivariate quadratic equations (MQ). For example authors show that for 128-bit Rijndael, the problem of recovering the secret key from one single plaintext can be written as a system of 8000 quadratic equations with 1600 binary unknowns. Thus the security of Rijndael requires that there are no efficient algorithms for solving such systems. In a paper published at Eurocrypt 2000 Shamir et al. describe an algorithm called XL (or/and FXL)  that seems to solve such systems in subexponential time.