Cryptography survey as an undergrad

Question

Is cryptography so specialized that taking a survey class is a waste of time? I'm not the type of person who can do logs in my head or has a deep mathematical aptitude, but cryptography is certainly very interesting. But I wonder if I'll scratch the surface and realize quite quickly that there are very few who can participate in the greater conversations.

Answer 1

No, I think a general understanding of what a cipher, hash, signature, MAC and a few other of these concepts will make it much easier to understand what cryptography is about.

It's like some knowledge about cars can be very helpful, even if you don't get to be a mechanic. Especially understanding a bit about certificates and PKI is pretty useful, as it is the underlying authentication structure for the internet (especially TLS and therefore HTTPS).

We may be a bit biased here. You can get by pretty well without knowing cryptography. Then again, you won't need a lot of mathematics unless you presume you're going to build cryptographic algorithms or perform cryptographic analysis.

Answer 2

This is an opinion-based question to a large extent, but I hope it doesn't get flagged as off-topic, because it's really pertinent, specially in the context of the Meta question that Biv linked.

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I agree with Maarten's answer, but I want to add a bit, based on my own personal experience. Cryptography is a very deep subject, in the sense that very simple functionality needs a lot of layers and analysis to be correctly done. But that only means that you can always take a deeper look and find more details.

That said, however, cryptography is not hard to describe. Most ideas can be described with analogies of locks, keys and dice. Everybody can understand ideas like privacy and integrity, because it is a common concern: we don't want our photos leaked nor our bank balances get random changes. Once the functionality and motivations is clear, the paths to follow are long and diverse, and you can stop at any point without having wasted your time. It doesn't take abstract algebra knowledge to have an educated opinion about the FBI-Apple encryption issue, to name one recent famous case.

If it's your first course covering information security, prepare to wonder. The way in which you see information, what can be done with it and what it represents to modern life is likely to be permanently changed.