4 ms·

Large primes are used in cryptographic algorithms as well. http://math.stackexchange.com/a/43120 http://math.stackexchange.com/a/43120

• ColinWright 14y ago
  Not Mersenne Primes, because they have a special structure that can create weaknesses.
  • alexkus 14y ago
    And such encryption relies on the primes that are used remaining secret. Using any of the 'well known' primes would be a bad idea as it is easy to go through the 'well known' primes and test to see if they were used as a basis for the encryption.
  • pbsd 14y ago
    While Mersenne primes make breaking discrete logs easier over prime fields, they're pretty OK to use as underlying field on elliptic curve groups (cf. p521).