4 ms·
> One possible reason is that pre-baked primes can be designed to avoid certain pitfalls (e.g. primes close to powers of 2, which the article implies can be sol
by imagist 10y ago
> One possible reason is that pre-baked primes can be designed to avoid certain pitfalls (e.g. primes close to powers of 2, which the article implies can be solved using the much faster algorithm) or otherwise to be resistant against certain cryptographic attacks.
Why can't those primes be calculated on the fly? Checking a number for being within a certain distance of a power of two is well within the programming capability of a freshman CS student.
> I don't know enough about DH to know if that's really the case here or if it's merely done to avoid having to compute fresh large primes, but I'm going to guess there's a good reason for it.
Given the incentives involved, I see strong reason to believe this is not the case.
- eridius 10y ago> Why can't those primes be calculated on the fly? Checking a number for being within a certain distance of a power of two is well within the programming capability of a freshman CS student. You're assuming that that's the only criteria for a bad prime, but as this article points out, it's not. > Given the incentives involved, I see strong reason to believe this is not the case. Incentives where? The incentives by nearly everybody involved in making crypto is to be secure. The NSA wants to be able to break crypto, but the NSA didn't write the software that uses these primes (e.g. Apache).