This is a good point. The interesting there here is the raw level of information you need to have to even hope to do something new. From a period, say WWII up t

This is a good point. The interesting there here is the raw level of information you need to have to even hope to do something new. From a period, say WWII up to when Shannon was just doing his seminal work, you could think maybe a little on a fairly broad area, and maybe come up with something new. Now, as with many areas of academic thinking, you have to learn so much just to get to a point where you can advance a really small piece of state of the art just a little bit. I think a lot of real math and academic work follows this pattern, and it is the reason one has a right to be skeptical, or even dismissive, of someone doing something like this if they were to present it as a serious work. "Here, try to break this". It is great for someone to learn the true scope of their ignorance, but at the same time, it is also so unlikely you have done even the tiniest novel thing that it is almost always OK to dismiss it out of hand. Cryptography is really just an applied branch of math/information theory. Things that work for advancing the state of art for math are generally the same tools that work for advancing the state of art for cryptography. In the raw, pure and abstract sense. In the practical world, where you have to have real bits on real physical things, the attacks are myriad and the innovators in that space often need minimal training in cryptography (relative to someone doing the theoretical work).