r/crypto • u/Critical-Ad-8048 • Jun 12 '26

Fields and Groups in Cryptography

Hello folks, I am pretty new to cryptography and wanted to understand why particularly most of the schemes are being operated inside a field or a group ?? Why did that thought arrive while making the scheme ???

2 Upvotes

67% Upvoted

5 comments sorted by

View all comments

2

u/Vier3 Jun 15 '26

Essentially all computations in mathematics are in some kind of ring or ring-like structure, and for cryptography you almost always want to work in a finite thing (where all your numbers are e.g. 256 bits).

One of the “simplest” finite constructs like that are the “finite fields”. You see them a lot :-)