Measuring Human Cryptanalysis Effort

Matthew Green has launched a website that aims to quantify the amount of human effort spent on cryptanalyzing various public-key algorithms. The site estimates the number of cryptanalyst-hours dedicated to analyzing each algorithm by examining the existing literature. To do this, it classifies cryptanalytic work from approximately 16,000 papers and converts them into estimated research years. This is achieved through a mapping of authors at the individual level. The estimates are based on publication data and may provide a substantial overview of the effort spent on different public-key assumptions. The site focuses on algorithms such as ECDLP, lattices, and syndrome decoding.