We are right now at about the golden start of misuse resistant cryptography. Libraries like NACL/libsodium/tink are a basic reckoning that cryptography has to be safe for mortals to use. That makes humble mortals the PERFECT people to be involved writing it.
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And there's not too much to it. You could spend three to five hours a week reading up on cryptography and playing with toy projects and in a month you can fully understand the math behind say RSA, DH, AES, ChaCha20. A few more and you can include EC.
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That's a ridiculous return on an investment. Do the CryptoPal challenges at https://www.cryptopals.com/ . Complete those! Unbelievably employable, Big shortage of people like that, probably forever.
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The key to all this is to find a team that does have some experts, who can review your work and give you feedback and a safety net. Feel free to contribute to https://github.com/awslabs/s2n , we'll absolutely help you! I know other projects are welcoming too.
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... which is another thing. The Cryptography world, and security more broadly, is mostly super friendly, nonjudgmental and on the side of the oppressed. It's an awesome community to be in.
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O.k. back to some why's. So misuse-resistant cryptography is taking off. Great time to surf the wave. But there's more coming! Securing data against post-Quantum threats is going to keep us all busy for the next 10 years minimum.
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Secure end-to-end cryptography is becoming table-stakes. Everything needs it, everywhere. How many other fields can you say that about?
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Some closer stories from my personal experience: at Amazon we hire a lot of people from college into a general-purpose SDE1 role. We've had many such people join one of our crypto-focused teams and absolutely succeed.
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If you go through the commits of s2n, you'll find a bunch! And they are absolute *experts* now. It's amazing to watch them dissect things. This stuff is totally doable. It's not magic, forbidden knowledge only for the special few. It's for US!
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My own story is littered with being garbage at math. I was a C student in high-school. Same when we did math at university. But getting into Cryptography really changed that. It unlocked a lot of the "why" of math for me, it gave it all a sudden purpose that was super motivating.
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... I ended up *teaching* university level math, and I still teach a bit today. I still make mistakes, my numeracy isn't great, and I'm not going to be a mathematician any time soon, but it's gratifying to at least be competent. Thanks to Cryptography!
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Final tweet: Don't be discouraged by the intimidating appearance, find a team and spend a few hours a week on it, and get stuck in. If you do it now, it's really really good timing, and you can make LOTS of money. Also: we're hiring.
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