From: tcmay@netcom.com (Timothy C. May)
Date: Mon, 21 Nov 94 17:08:49 PST
To: claborne@microcosm.sandiegoca.NCR.COM (Claborne, Chris)
Subject: Re: Pentium bug and CRYPTO
In-Reply-To: <2ED0DE87@microcosm.SanDiegoCA.NCR.COM>
Message-ID: <199411220108.RAA14740@netcom6.netcom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



Claborne, Chris wrote:

> Will the following error (Re Pentium Floating Point Bug     Date: 15 Nov 
> 1994)
> cause problems with PGP key generation or any other normal operations with
> PGP or other crypto.  I'm not a math mathmatics nerd but I know we generally 
> 
> deal with big numbers.

We do indeed deal with "big numbers," but big INTEGER numbers. Whole
numbers.

The Pentium FDIV bug shows up only, so far as is known, with certain
floating point numerator/denominator combinations. No crypto
computation I can imagine would use the FDIV instruction.

--Tim May


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