Re: subjective names and MITM

[tcmay@got.net (Timothy C. May)]

At 10:36 PM 10/6/95, Scott Brickner wrote:

>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.

The commonly used method is to generate a random number, then interate up
(or down, it doesn't matter), testing each number in turn for primality.
One doesn't have to test too many numbers to find a prime, as I explained
in my last post.

It is indeed true that the entropy or randomness lies in the selection of
the random number that one starts searching from.


--Tim May


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