Selected Areas in Cryptography (SAC) is an international cryptographyconference (originally a workshop) held every August in Canada since 1994. The first workshop was organized by Carlisle Adams, Henk Meijer, Stafford Tavares and Paul van Oorschot. Through 1999, SAC was hosted at either Queen's University or Carleton University, but starting in 2000, locations have ranged across Canada. SAC has featured research presentations on many cryptographic topics, with a traditional focus on the design and analysis of block ciphers. SAC is regarded as a high-quality venue for presenting cryptographic results, and is the only cryptography conference held annually in Canada. Since 2003, SAC has included an invited lecture called the Stafford Tavares Lecture, in honor of one of its original organizers and strongest supporters.
Each year, SAC features four topics:
Design and analysis of symmetric key primitives and cryptosystems including block and stream ciphers, hash functions, MAC algorithms, and authenticated encryption schemes.
Efficient implementations of symmetric and public key algorithms.
Mathematical and algorithmic aspects of applied cryptology.
A special topic selected by the current co-chairs that may vary from year to year.
In cryptography, a block cipher is a deterministic algorithm operating on fixed-length groups of bits, called blocks. It uses an unvarying transformation, that is, it uses a symmetric key. They are specified elementary components in the design of many cryptographic protocols and are widely used to implement the encryption of large amounts of data, including data exchange protocols.
The Data Encryption Standard is a symmetric-key algorithm for the encryption of digital data. Although its short key length of 56 bits makes it too insecure for applications, it has been highly influential in the advancement of cryptography.
Articles related to cryptography include:
In cryptography, an S-box (substitution-box) is a basic component of symmetric key algorithms which performs substitution. In block ciphers, they are typically used to obscure the relationship between the key and the ciphertext, thus ensuring Shannon's property of confusion. Mathematically, an S-box is a vectorial Boolean function.
In cryptography, CAST-128 is a symmetric-key block cipher used in a number of products, notably as the default cipher in some versions of GPG and PGP. It has also been approved for Government of Canada use by the Communications Security Establishment. The algorithm was created in 1996 by Carlisle Adams and Stafford Tavares using the CAST design procedure.
In cryptography, a Feistel cipher is a symmetric structure used in the construction of block ciphers, named after the German-born physicist and cryptographer Horst Feistel who did pioneering research while working for IBM (USA); it is also commonly known as a Feistel network. A large proportion of block ciphers use the scheme, including the US Data Encryption Standard, the Soviet/Russian GOST and the more recent Blowfish and Twofish ciphers. In a Feistel cipher, encryption and decryption are very similar operations, and both consist of iteratively running a function called a "round function" a fixed number of times.
In cryptography, the Tiny Encryption Algorithm (TEA) is a block cipher notable for its simplicity of description and implementation, typically a few lines of code. It was designed by David Wheeler and Roger Needham of the Cambridge Computer Laboratory; it was first presented at the Fast Software Encryption workshop in Leuven in 1994, and first published in the proceedings of that workshop.
In cryptography, Camellia is a symmetric key block cipher with a block size of 128 bits and key sizes of 128, 192 and 256 bits. It was jointly developed by Mitsubishi Electric and NTT of Japan. The cipher has been approved for use by the ISO/IEC, the European Union's NESSIE project and the Japanese CRYPTREC project. The cipher has security levels and processing abilities comparable to the Advanced Encryption Standard.
In cryptography, CAST-256 is a symmetric-key block cipher published in June 1998. It was submitted as a candidate for the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES); however, it was not among the five AES finalists. It is an extension of an earlier cipher, CAST-128; both were designed according to the "CAST" design methodology invented by Carlisle Adams and Stafford Tavares. Howard Heys and Michael Wiener also contributed to the design.
In cryptography, SAFER is the name of a family of block ciphers designed primarily by James Massey on behalf of Cylink Corporation. The early SAFER K and SAFER SK designs share the same encryption function, but differ in the number of rounds and the key schedule. More recent versions — SAFER+ and SAFER++ — were submitted as candidates to the AES process and the NESSIE project respectively. All of the algorithms in the SAFER family are unpatented and available for unrestricted use.
In cryptography, DEAL is a symmetric block cipher derived from the Data Encryption Standard (DES). The design was proposed in a report by Lars Knudsen in 1998, and was submitted to the AES contest by Richard Outerbridge.
In cryptography, the avalanche effect is the desirable property of cryptographic algorithms, typically block ciphers and cryptographic hash functions, wherein if an input is changed slightly, the output changes significantly. In the case of high-quality block ciphers, such a small change in either the key or the plaintext should cause a drastic change in the ciphertext. The actual term was first used by Horst Feistel, although the concept dates back to at least Shannon's diffusion.
Akelarre is a block cipher proposed in 1996, combining the basic design of IDEA with ideas from RC5. It was shown to be susceptible to a ciphertext-only attack in 1997.
In cryptography, DFC is a symmetric block cipher which was created in 1998 by a group of researchers from École Normale Supérieure, CNRS, and France Télécom and submitted to the AES competition.
Carlisle M. Adams is a Canadian cryptographer and computer security researcher. Formerly senior cryptographer at Entrust, he is currently a professor at the University of Ottawa. His notable work includes the design of the block ciphers CAST-128 and CAST-256, whose S-boxes are based on the non-linear properties of bent functions. He also helped organize the first Selected Areas in Cryptography (SAC) workshop in 1994. He is also the security advisor of the Ottawa-based electronic signature company Signority.
Stafford Emanuel Tavares is a cryptographer, professor emeritus at Queen's University. His notable work includes the design of the block ciphers CAST-128 and CAST-256. He also helped organize the first Selected Areas in Cryptography (SAC) workshop in 1994. Since 2003, SAC has included an invited lecture in his honor, the Stafford Tavares Lecture.
In cryptography, a distinguishing attack is any form of cryptanalysis on data encrypted by a cipher that allows an attacker to distinguish the encrypted data from random data. Modern symmetric-key ciphers are specifically designed to be immune to such an attack. In other words, modern encryption schemes are pseudorandom permutations and are designed to have ciphertext indistinguishability. If an algorithm is found that can distinguish the output from random faster than a brute force search, then that is considered a break of the cipher.
Cryptography, or cryptology, is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of third parties called adversaries. More generally, cryptography is about constructing and analyzing protocols that prevent third parties or the public from reading private messages; various aspects in information security such as data confidentiality, data integrity, authentication, and non-repudiation are central to modern cryptography. Modern cryptography exists at the intersection of the disciplines of mathematics, computer science, electrical engineering, communication science, and physics. Applications of cryptography include electronic commerce, chip-based payment cards, digital currencies, computer passwords, and military communications.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to cryptography:
Anne Canteaut is a French researcher in cryptography, working at the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation (INRIA) in Paris. She studies the design and cryptanalysis of symmetric-key algorithms and S-boxes.
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