> 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 capabi

> 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).