SAC 99 was the sixth in a series of annual workshops on Selected Areas in Cryptography.
Previous workshops were held at Carleton University in Ottawa (1995 and 1997) and at Queen s
University in Kingston (1994 1996 and 1998). The intent of the annual workshop is to provide
a relaxed atmosphere in which researchers in cryptography can present and discuss new work on
selected areas of current interest. The themes for the SAC 99 workshop were: { Design and
Analysis of Symmetric Key Cryptosystems { E cient Implementations of Cryptographic Systems {
Cryptographic Solutions for Web Internet Security The timing of the workshop was particularly
fortuitous as the announcement by NIST of the v e nalists for AES coincided with the rst
morning of the workshop precipitating lively discussion on the merits of the selection! A
total of 29 papers were submitted to SAC 99 and after a review process that had all papers
reviewed by at least 3 referees 17 were accepted and p- sented. As well two invited
presentations were given: one by Miles Smid from NIST entitled From DES to AES: Twenty Years of
Government Initiatives in Cryptographyand the other by Mike Reiter from Bell Labs entitled
Password Hardening with Applications to VPN Security. The program committee for SAC 99
consisted of the following members: Carlisle Adams Tom Cusick Howard Heys Lars Knudsen Henk
Meijer Luke O Connor Doug Stinson Stao rd Tavares and Serge Vaudenay.
