SAC 2001, the eighth annual workshop on selected areas in cryptography, was held at the Fields Institute in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Previous SAC wo- shops were held at Queen's University in Kingston (1994, 1996, 1998, and 1999), at Carlton University in Ottawa (1995 and 1997) and at the University of Wat- loo (2000). The conference was sponsored by the center for applied cryptographic research (CACR) at the University of Waterloo, Certicom Corporation, C- munications and Information Technology Ontario (CITO), Ecole Polytechnique F'ed'erale de Lausanne, Entrust Technologies, and ZeroKnowledge. We are gra- ful to these organizations for their support of the conference. The current SAC board includes Carlisle Adams, Doug Stinson, Ed Dawson, Henk Meijer, Howard Heys, Michael Wiener, Serge Vaudenay, Sta?ord Tavares, and Tom Cusick. We would like to thank all of them for giving us the mandate to organize SAC 2001. The themes for SAC 2001 workshop were: - Design and analysis of symmetric key cryptosystems. - Primitives for private key cryptography, including block and stream ciphers, hash functions, and MACs. - E?cient implementations of cryptographic systems in public and private key cryptography.
- Cryptographic solutions for web and internet security.