[12689] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: Proven Primes
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Tim Dierks)
Fri Mar 7 15:38:27 2003
X-Original-To: cryptography@wasabisystems.com
X-Original-To: cryptography@wasabisystems.com
Date: Fri, 07 Mar 2003 13:40:56 -0500
To: Cryptography <cryptography@wasabisystems.com>
From: Tim Dierks <tim@dierks.org>
In-Reply-To: <3E686E90.1000500@algroup.co.uk>
At 10:04 AM 3/7/2003 +0000, Ben Laurie wrote:
>Indeed. The commonly used one is ECPP which uses elliptic curves cunningly
>to not only prove primality, but to produce a certificate which can be
>quickly verified.
>
>Probabilistic prime tests are just that - probable. ECPP actually proves it.
Does anyone, in practice, care about the distinction, if the probability
that the prime test has failed can be proved to be far less than the chance
that a hardware failure has caused a false positive ECPP test? To restate
the question: all calculation methods have a certain possibility of
failure, whether due to human or mechanical error, however minute that
possibility may be. If I can use a probabalistic primality test to reduce
the possibility of error due to algorithm failure to a point that it's well
below the possibility of error due to hardware failure, what's the
practical difference?
Thanks,
- Tim
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