Call for papers and submission instructions

The 33rd Conference on Selected Areas in Cryptography (SAC 2026) will take place at the University of Ottawa in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada on August 26–28, 2026, and will be preceded by the SAC Summer School on August 24–25, 2026.

Authors are encouraged to submit original research papers related to the following themes for SAC 2026. Note that the first three are traditional SAC areas; the fourth topic is the special focus for this year.

1. Design and analysis of symmetric key primitives and cryptosystems, including block and stream ciphers, hash functions, MAC algorithms, and authenticated encryption schemes.
2. Efficient implementations of symmetric and public key algorithms.
3. Mathematical and algorithmic aspects of applied cryptology.
4. Lattice-based and code-based cryptography.

SAC 2026 also welcomes papers in any of the areas above with a focus on post-quantum cryptography.

The SAC 2026 proceedings will be published by Springer in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series.

Instructions for Authors

• Papers must be submitted electronically. Late submissions, submissions by email, or hardcopy submissions will not be accepted. A submission link will be made available on the conference website prior to the submission deadline.
• Submissions must be anonymous, with no author names, affiliations, acknowledgments or obvious references.
• Papers must be typeset using LaTeX in the LNCS style with no alterations to font size or margins, except for the use of \pagestyle{plain} to add page numbers. The use of BibTex in conjunction with LNCS’s bibliography style splncs04.bst is strongly recommended. The use of CryptoBib is encouraged as well. The LaTeX source should begin with:

  \documentclass{llncs}
  \pagestyle{plain}
  

• The submitted paper must be at most 27 pages in length, including any appendices, but excluding references (appendices should appear before references). The final published version of an accepted paper is expected to closely match the submitted version. Authors may submit supplementary material together with the paper, in order to help reviewers verify the validity of the results (e.g., source code, experimental results) or to discuss details that are not essential to the main results. However, this supplementary material will not be published in the final version. Therefore, readers should be able to understand and verify what is at the heart of the contribution, conceptually and technically, without the supplementary material, and reviewers are not required to read it. In particular, supplementary material must not be used to defer proofs of the main results.
• Papers must be written in English, and begin with a title, a short abstract, and a list of keywords. An introduction section should summarize the paper’s contributions at a level appropriate for a non-specialist reader.
• Submissions must be in PDF format.

The link to the submission server will be added soon.

Submission implies the commitment of at least one of the authors to present the paper at the conference. The SAC Chairs reserve the right to withdraw papers from the proceedings that are not presented at the conference or for which the camera-ready post-proceedings version is not submitted by the deadline.

Irregular submissions. SAC follows the IACR’s Policy on Irregular Submissions. Submissions must not substantially duplicate work that any of the authors has published elsewhere or has submitted in parallel to a journal or any other conference/workshop that has proceedings. The SAC Chairs reserve the right to share information about submissions with other program committees or journal editors to detect parallel submissions. In addition, the SAC Chairs reserve the right to contact an author’s institution/corporation and/or other appropriate organizations if an irregular submission is detected. Submissions not meeting these guidelines risk rejection without consideration of their merits. For further details, please refer to the IACR Policy on Irregular Submissions.

Conflicts of interest. SAC follows the IACR’s Policy on Conflicts of Interest (COI). Authors, program committee members, and reviewers for SAC must adhere to the IACR Policy on Conflicts of Interest. Authors are requested to identify all members of the SAC Program Committee who have an automatic conflict of interest with the submission, and disclose it at the time of submission. It is the responsibility of all authors to ensure correct reporting of COI information. Submissions with incorrect or incomplete COI information may be rejected without consideration of their merits. For further details, please refer to the IACR Policy on Conflicts of Interest.

Code of conduct. SAC is committed to providing an experience free of harassment and discrimination, respecting the dignity of every participant. Participants who violate this code may be sanctioned and/or expelled from the event, at the discretion of the Chairs. Serious incidents may be referred to the IACR Ethics Committee for further possible action. Any action will only be taken with the consent of the affected party subject to applicable laws.

If you experience harassment or discriminatory behaviour at SAC , we encourage you to reach out to any of the SAC Chairs or the Chair of the SAC Board (Douglas Stebila <dstebila@uwaterloo.ca>).

If you witness harassment or discriminatory behaviour, please consider intervening.

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

Program committee

• Aleksander Essex, Western University, Canada
• Antonio Guimarães, IMDEA Software Institute, Spain
• Ashwin Jha, Ruhr University Bochum, Germany
• Atefeh (Atty) Mashatan, Toronto Metropolitan University, Canada
• Augustin Bariant, ANSSI, France
• Avijit Dutta, TCG CREST and AcSIR, India
• Benjamin Wesolowski, CNRS and ENS de Lyon, France
• Carlisle Adams, University of Ottawa, Canada
• Charlotte Lefevre, Radboud University, The Netherlands
• Christina Boura, IRIF, Université Paris Cité, France
• Clémence Bouvier, Inria Nancy, France
• Corentin Jeudy, Orange Labs, France
• Damien Ligier, DESILO, South Korea
• Daniel Panario, Carleton University, Canada
• David Jao, University of Waterloo, Canada
• Douglas Stebila, University of Waterloo, Canada
• Eran Lambooij, Inria Paris, France
• Gaëtan Cassiers, CryptoExperts, France
• Gustavo Banegas, Inria and Laboratoire d’Informatique de l’Ecole polytechnique and Institut Polytechnique de Paris, France
• Huapeng Wu, University of Windsor, Canada
• Jipeng Zhang, National University of Singapore, Singapore
• Joël Felderhoff, King’s College London, United Kingdom
• Julian Nowakowski, Ruhr University Bochum, Germany and Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica, The Netherlands
• Kalikinkar Mandal, University of New Brunswick, Canada.
• Kazuhiko Minematsu, NEC, Japan
• Lewis Glabush, EPFL, Switzerland
• Ling Song, Jinan University, China
• Luca De Feo, IBM Research Europe, Switzerland
• Maxime Bombar, University of Bordeaux, France
• Mohammad Hajiabadi, University of Waterloo, Canada
• Mustafa Khairallah, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
• Neekon Vafa, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, United States
• Philippe Lamontagne, National Research Council Canada and Université de Montréal, Canada
• Pierre Briaud, CNRS and University of Limoges, France
• Rachelle Heim Boissier, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium
• Rei Safavi-Naini, University of Calgary, Canada
• Riham AlTawy, University of Victoria, Canada
• Ruben Niederhagen, Academia Sinica, Taiwan, and University of Southern Denmark, Denmark
• Sam Jaques, University of Waterloo, Canada
• Shivam Bhasin, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
• Siemen Dhooghe, Google, Belgium
• Stjepan Picek, University of Zagreb, Croatia and Radboud University, The Netherlands
• Svetla Nikova, KU Leuven, Belgium
• Tamer Mour, Bocconi University, Italy
• Tanja Lange, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands
• Thomas Pornin, NCC Group, Canada
• Tim Güneysu, Ruhr University Bochum, Germany
• Xiao Liang, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
• Zhenzhen Bao, Tsinghua University, China

Stipends and Visas

Authors of accepted papers – particularly student authors – who are unable to attend the conference for financial reasons, may contact the organizers to apply for financial support. Stipends subject to availability of funds.

Conference attendees should refer to the Government of Canada website for information about visa requirements to attend SAC . Submitters who may require visas are encouraged to begin the process early, and in particular can contact the organizers after submission but prior to the notification deadline to request a letter of invitation.

SAC Summer School

The SAC Summer School will be held prior to SAC, on August 24–25, 2026, at the University of Ottawa. The purpose of the SAC Summer School is to provide participants with an opportunity to gain in-depth knowledge of specific areas of cryptography related to the current SAC topics by bringing together world-class researchers who will give extended talks (half-day) in their areas of specialty. The SAC Summer School is open to all attendees, and may be of particular interest to students, postdocs, and other early-career researchers.

SAC Organizing Committee

• Andrej Bogdanov, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
• Gaëtan Leurent, COSMIQ team, Inria, Paris, France

General enquiries about SAC , including requests for invitation letters and questions about registration, should be sent to sac2026chairs@inria.fr.