Comment by zem

sure, the premise doesn't hold up as rigorous "hard" sf, like anything else involving ftl (though I do like the idea in the eschaton series that fine, you have ftl, but that doesn't make spacetime magically non-einsteinean). what I was getting at was that within that setting you cannot apply laws from our universe as to what forms of cryptography are physically infeasible to crack.

btw one of my favourite "the protagonist is much smarter than everyone else" novels is kress's badly underrated "an alien light", where sort of like tatja grimm she's a genius in a primitive society, but that comes to light when aliens try to teach the natives some basic science and she figures out a lot more than they bargained for.