4 ms·

Any time I see research or visualizations of primes, I get nervous. I fear that all of our online security is based on encryption and all of that is based on th

by po 16y ago

Any time I see research or visualizations of primes, I get nervous. I fear that all of our online security is based on encryption and all of that is based on the one-way nature of prime functions. Can you imagine a world where someone discovers a way to trivially decode every https or ssh session on the internet? I fear we are building a city on top of the fog.

zitterbewegung 16y ago
I wouldn't worry so much. RSA is based on the integer factorization problem . Hypothetically if you figured out any pattern in the distribution of prime numbers it would help in the factorization but there has been about hundreds of years of research in this direction and it is a extremely hard problem. Even if this was solved we could always move to ECC encryption like curve22519 Sources http://cr.yp.to/ecdh.html http://cr.yp.to/ecdh.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riemann_hypothesis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riemann_hypothesis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_problem
yycom 16y ago
Clearly number theory research is a prohibited circumvention activity and should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
- po 16y ago
  You laugh today…
  - zitterbewegung 16y ago
    Yea, but number theory also allows us to devise new crypto systems... for example take a look at curve 25519
- dexen 16y ago
  As a metanote, I wish there was a standard way of marking sarcasm and joke posts on HN, so they don't get downvoted simply because they don't make sense when interpreted literally.
  - J3L2404 16y ago
    ;)