Comment by kibibyte

3 years ago

I don’t know if that’s easily quantifiable, but I had a cryptography professor (fairly well-known nowadays) several years ago tell us that she only trusted 7 people (or some other absurdly low number), one of them being djb, to be able to evaluate the security of cryptographic schemes.

Perhaps thousands of people in the world can show you proofs of security, but very few of them may be able to take into account all practical considerations like side channels and the like.