Technologist Matthew Green launched a new web resource designed to estimate the number of cryptanalyst-hours spent analyzing various public-key algorithms.
Mapping Research Allocation Across Cryptographic Assumptions
The site relies on academic literature as its primary measurement instrument. By processing roughly sixteen thousand candidate papers, the project classifies cryptanalytic efforts directed at the Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithm Problem (ECDLP), structured and plain lattices, syndrome decoding, and related mathematical comparators.
To convert raw publication counts into meaningful metrics, the pipeline utilizes a person-level author map. This maps papers into estimated research-allocation years. Matthew Green established the project’s core questions, drove the primary methodological decisions, and oversaw the workflow.
Automated Pipeline Architecture Built by Advanced AI Models
The technical foundation of the site was constructed using advanced machine learning infrastructure. AI models Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Opus 5.5 built the underlying data pipeline, executed the analysis, and wrote the site infrastructure, with additional contributions from GPT-6 Astra.
Despite the sophistication of the automated pipeline, the dataset carries significant limitations. Because the system draws exclusively from published literature, unpublished work remains entirely invisible in the metrics. This blind spot encompasses both academic cryptanalysis that failed to yield a formal publication and classified cryptanalytic operations conducted in secret by intelligence agencies.
Lattice-Based Cryptography Overtakes Elliptic Curves
Historical trends within the resulting data highlight shifting cryptographic focus. Lattices have surpassed elliptic curves in cumulative research allocation only recently. The project expresses this evolving history as inference budgets evaluated under stated productivity assumptions.
While the methodology overstates actual time spent due to publication bias and multi-author duplication, the platform provides the first structured metric for tracking human cryptanalytic effort against modern cryptographic primitives.
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