Bits of Work: Measuring Cryptanalytic Effort

a website created by cryptographer Matthew Green that estimates how much public cryptanalysis effort different public-key cryptographic assumptions have received, and what that effort would cost under assumed AI productivity . The project starts from roughly sixteen thousand candidate papers, classifies the cryptanalytic work on problems including ECDLP (elliptic-curve discrete logarithm), structured and plain lattices, and syndrome decoding, and converts publications into estimated research-allocation years through a person-level author map . A headline finding is that lattices have only recently overtaken elliptic curves on this cumulative measure—a reminder that the newer post-quantum assumptions have had far less time under adversarial scrutiny than the older ones most deployed systems rely on today . The site includes a detailed bibliography and a "who's working" section showing top cryptanalysis researchers by field . Caveats matter: the authors warn that publication-based estimates may substantially overstate actual time spent, and Bruce Schneier notes the method counts only published work, so secret or unpublished cryptanalysis is invisible . The page states the study was conducted by AI models—Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Opus 5.5 built the pipeline, ran the analysis, and wrote the page, with contributions from GPT-6 Astra—while Matthew Green set the questions and oversaw the work 

https://bitsofwork.org/

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