Ask HN: Student Internships Relating to Cryptography

3 pointsandutu4y ago2 comments

I'm a 3rd year student majoring in computer science at the University of Texas at Dallas.

I've been looking around for Summer 2022 internships and all of them seem to be just general software dev, machine learning, data science, etc., internships. Basically anything except cryptography.

I've applied to positions at IBM and a few other places relating to cryptography and even though there's a good number of cryptocurrency startups, many don't seem to take on interns.

It's a shame as I've realized I have a passion for cryptography. For example, I've recently taken a midterm for a grad crypto class and it was one of the only times I got full marks on a university exam. I've been going through the Cryptopals Challenges and doing NSA Codebreakers 2021 though I have much to learn.

So, how does a student find cryptography-related internships, both academic and industry?

2 comments

high_byte4y ago

99.9% cryptocurrency do not touch cryptography. be sure what you're looking for.

cryptography is very niche. mostly because it is widely known you should NOT roll out your own encryption. that being said, there are fields of research - trying to break known ciphers, or improving implementations for speedups, sometimes implementing from scratch for dedicated hardware, but again is very, very niche, and the bar for entry is probably very high.

on the other hand you might have meant cryptocurrency, in which case is a whole other topic.

tata714y ago

Nobody's trusting interns with this work — that's why the same cool internships don't exist as other fields.

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