Selected Areas in Cryptography (SAC) is Canada’s research conference on cryptography, held annually since 1994.
The 33rd edition of SAC will take place at the University of Ottawa in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada from August 26–28, 2026, and will be preceded by the SAC Summer School on August 24–25, 2026.
SAC 2026 will be co-located with the 23rd Annual International Conference on Privacy, Security, and Trust (PST 2026).
Topics
There are four areas covered at each SAC conference. Three of the areas are permanent.
- Design and analysis of symmetric key primitives and cryptosystems, including block and stream ciphers, hash function, MAC algorithms, cryptographic permutations, and authenticated encryption schemes;
- Efficient implementations of symmetric and public key algorithms; and
- Mathematical and algorithmic aspects of applied cryptology.
The special selected topic for SAC 2026 is:
- Lattice-based and code-based cryptography.
SAC 2026 also welcomes papers in any of the areas above with a focus on post-quantum cryptography.
Conference Co-Chairs
- Andrej Bogdanov, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
- Gaëtan Leurent, COSMIQ team, Inria, Paris, France
Important dates
- Paper submission deadline (cycle 1): Monday, February 2, 2026 (AoE)
- Notification (cycle 1): Thursday, March 19, 2026
- Paper submission deadline (cycle 2): Monday, May 11, 2026 (AoE)
- Notification (cycle 2): Thursday, June 25, 2026
- SAC Summer School: Monday, August 24 – Tuesday, August 25, 2026
- Conference: Wednesday, August 26 – Friday, August 28, 2026
Banner image credit Ottawa Tourism.
