Article View: alt.security.pgp
Article #5Re: Prime generation, a possible weakness in PGP?
From: Derek Atkins
Date: Thu, 08 Oct 1992 04:49
Date: Thu, 08 Oct 1992 04:49
23 lines
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1647 bytes
- then use Fermat's theorem 4 times
(Fermat's theorem: if b**(n-1) != 1 (mod n), then
'n' cannot be a prime. This requires that 'b' and 'n'
are relatively prime.)
In all the numbers less than 10^12 (or something like that),
the Fermat test using b=2 will fail (i.e., give a false positive
reading) for only 15000 numbers. Thats 15000 out of 10^12! Thats
like 1 in 10^8, which are worse odds than you winning the lottery!
Now, if you iterate this four times, you increase your odds,
probabalistically, of having a good number. Yes, you do have to
worry about the Carmichael numbers (since there are an infinity of
them), however there are far fewer Carmichael numbers than there
are primes.
-derek
--
Derek Atkins -- MIT '93 -- Electrical Engineering
--warlord@MIT.EDU | ..!mit-eddie!mit-athena!warlord | s20069@mitvma.bitnet
Chairman, MIT Student Information Processing Board (SIPB)
MIT Media Laboratory, Speech Research Group
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Newsgroups: alt.security.pgp,sci.crypt Path: arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!sparky!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!tamsun.tamu.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!bloom-picayune.mit.edu!news.mit.edu!warlord From: warlord@MIT.EDU (Derek Atkins) Subject: Re: Prime generation, a possible weakness in PGP? In-Reply-To: Ari.Huttunen@hut.fi's message of Sun, 27 Sep 1992 15:45:52 GMT Message-ID: <WARLORD.92Oct8004937@m66-080-20.mit.edu> Sender: news@athena.mit.edu (News system) Nntp-Posting-Host: m66-080-20.mit.edu Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology References: <ARI.HUTTUNEN.92Sep27174550@laphroaig.cs.hut.fi> Distribution: alt Date: Thu, 8 Oct 1992 04:49:50 GMT Lines: 23