Event details
The 23rd Annual International Conference on Privacy, Security and Trust (PST 2026) is an international forum that brings together researchers, practitioners, industry professionals, and government representatives to exchange ideas and present the latest advances in privacy, cybersecurity, trust, artificial intelligence, and related technologies.
PST 2026 will be held in Ottawa, Canada, and will offer one industry day followed by two days of keynotes and technical presentations focused on Privacy, Security, and Trust, along with a special track on Emerging Technologies and Trends.
The conference features an Industry Day on August 26, 2026, at the University of Ottawa Kanata North Campus, followed by the main technical conference on August 27–28, 2026, at the University of Ottawa’s Desmarais Building (DMS 4101 – Camille Villeneuve Hall).
PST 2026 will be co-located with the Selected Areas in Cryptography (SAC 2026).
Speakers
Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi
Professor, Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany
Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi is a Professor of Computer Science and head of the System Security Lab at the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany. He led the university’s Cybersecurity Center from 2020 to 2023 and has directed multiple Intel Collaborative Research Labs since 2012.
He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Saarland, Germany, as well as degrees in Industrial and Electrical Engineering. Before joining academia, he worked in R&D at leading IT companies, including Ericsson Telecommunications. His research spans security, privacy, and system design, with lasting impact across academia and industry.
Prof. Sadeghi served as Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Security & Privacy Magazine and on the editorial boards of ACM TODAES, ACM TIOT, and ACM DTRAP. He is a member of the German Academy of Science and Engineering (acatech) and the ACM Europe Council. His achievements have been recognized with numerous prestigious awards, including the German Karl Heinz Beckurts Award for advancing Trusted Computing, the ACM SIGSAC Outstanding Contributions Award (2018), the Intel Academic Leadership Award (2021), the European Research Council Advanced Grant (2022), the DAC (Design Automation Conference) Service Award (2024), and the Synopsys Academic Award (2025).
Vyas Sekar
Tan Family Professor, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Vyas Sekar is the Tan Family Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. He is a member of CMU Cylab, where he co-directs the Future of Enterprise Security Initiative. He is also co-founder and Chief Technologist at Rockfish Data, and the Chief Scientist at Conviva. His research is at the intersection of networks, systems, and security.
His work has been recognized with the SIGCOMM Rising Star Award, NSA Science of Security prize, the Intel Outstanding Researcher Award, SIGCOMM Test of Time Awards, and multiple best paper awards.
Jeremy Clark
Associate Professor, Concordia University, Canada
Jeremy Clark will showcase three different use-cases of zero-knowledge proofs: governmental elections, the stock market, and cryptocurrency exchanges. For each application, we will also show a common mechanism for improving the efficiency of issuing a proof. We avoid using general-purpose zk-SNARK technology, which takes a description of a proof as a program or circuit, and compiles it into a proof. Instead we design the proof directly into an application-specific arithmetization of the voting/solvency/trading protocol, which cuts several steps out of the typical process for issuing proofs and improves prover time by one or two orders of magnitude over the zk-SNARK system Plonk.
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