International Conference on

Selected Areas in Cryptography

Canada's research conference on cryptography since 1994
SAC logo

About SAC

The Selected Areas in Cryptography (SAC) series was initiated in 1994, when the first workshop was held at Queen's University in Kingston. The organizing committee for that first workshop consisted of Carlisle Adams, Henk Meijer, Stafford Tavares, and Paul van Oorschot. From its original emphasis on block ciphers, SAC has evolved into a leading international conference in cryptography covering a range of topics in the field.

SAC has been held annually since 1994 in several Canadian provinces and is the only cryptography conference series that is held annually in Canada.

SAC 2025 – Toronto, Ontario – August 11–15, 2025

Thank you for joining us at SAC 2025 at Toronto Metropolitan University in downtown Toronto!

Pre-proceedings and slides from SAC 2025 are now available on the SAC website. Authors are reminded to submit their camera-ready versions for the proceedings by September 15.

SAC 2025 website

SAC 2026 – Ottawa, Ontario – August 24–28, 2026

SAC 2026 will take place at the University of Ottawa in Canada's capital city and will be co-located with the 23rd Annual International Conference on Privacy, Security, and Trust (PST) 2026 and QCrypt 2026.

SAC 2026 website

SAC 2027 – Victoria, BC

SAC 2027 will take place at the University of Victoria in British Columbia.

SAC Topics

Design and analysis icon
Design and analysis

Design and analysis of symmetric key primitives and cryptosystems including block and stream ciphers, hash functions, MAC algorithms, and authenticated encryption.

Implementation and efficiency icon
Implementation and efficiency

Efficient implementations of algorithms for symmetric, public key, and post-quantum cryptography.

Mathematics and algorithms icon
Mathematics and algorithms

Mathematical and algorithmic aspects of applied cryptology, including post-quantum cryptology.

Selected topics icon
Selected topics

A special topic selected each year by the current co-chairs.

The special topic for SAC 2025 will be machine learning and cryptography.

See past selected topics.

Proceedings

Since 1998, the proceedings of SAC have been published in Springer's Lecture Notes in Computer Science.

Papers from 1994–1997 are available on the SAC history page.