From: Scott Brickner <sjb@universe.digex.net>
Date: Fri, 6 Oct 95 15:36:40 PDT
To: patrick@verity.com (Patrick Horgan)
Subject: Re: subjective names and MITM
In-Reply-To: <9510061724.AA01171@cantina.verity.com>
Message-ID: <199510062236.SAA28120@universe.digex.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


Patrick Horgan writes:
>Given the difficulty of finding primes, how likely do you think it is that
>given one of the well known methods and finding the first 1024 bit prime
>that pops out would give you an effective attack?

I'm not an expert here, but I understand the "well-known methods" to
essentially use some formula that "tends" to generate prime numbers from
uniformly distributed numbers, feed it a "good" random number, and then
check to see if it's really prime.  If it's not, pick another "good"
random number and try again.  The entropy in the prime is the same
as in the random number generator.