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Comment by aburan28 | Hacker News Reader

Just take for example Elliptic Curves which sit at the crossroads of analytic theory, theory of functions, abstract algebra, algebraic geometry and number theory. It is nearly impossible for a single person to bear the cognitive overhead needed just to understand how might one approach attacking Elliptic Curve systems

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I disagree, it's hardly impossible. I would say any reasonably gifted maths grad student who has chosen the right combination of subjects (the requisite math, some cryptography, along with a low-level programming course or two), would be able to start working on attacks on EC systems.

Do those people grow on trees? No, because it's a much less common specialisation than most others (like aiming for the financials industry, or statistics/analytics/big data) simply because of the number of paying jobs in each field.

Not really, there's a bunch of groups around the world that work on breaking elliptic curve crypto.

It takes only a few years of mathematical training.

Seriously. It takes something like seven years, not counting undergraduate studies, to become a practicing physician. And once you achieve that, you can still only handle one physician's worth of case load. It takes far less time to learn enough math to become dangerous to a particular subfield of cryptography --- and once you achieve that, you have a decent shot at changing the state of the art for the entire world.

I'm not seeing the legitimate concern here.

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