Bill Stewart wrote:
>
> At 02:08 PM 05/24/2000 +0100, Ben Laurie wrote:
> >John Gilmore wrote:
> >> Anybody tested the primes in major products lately?
> >Interesting point ... of course, these days one can produce checkable
> >certificates of primality - but I'm not aware of any free software to do
> >it ... is there any?
>
> There's primality testing software in PGP's key generation routines,
> and also in the GIMPS Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search software.
> It's not designed for an independent input of test material,
> but that's not a tough thing to add wrappers for.
> I think somebody also did an N-Lines-Of-Perl version.
>
> GIMPS uses Lucas-Lehmer tests; I forget if PGP uses that or Miller-Rabin.
> It's a probablistic primality testing system, and if you wanted to do a
> widespread-use backdoor-checker, it might make sense to use some
> test primes in the usual sequence and some chosen at random.
>
> IIRC, Technically, it won't catch use of Carmichael numbers, but
> there aren't a lot of those.
I meant actual proofs of primality, not statistical tests!
>
> More seriously, there's David Jablon's point that it won't catch
> use of real primes from a small search space or other RNG tricks.
?? For a lot of applications the prime is published...
Cheers,
Ben.
--
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