Timeline for Is it safer to generate your own Diffie-Hellman primes or to use those defined in RFC 3526?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
5 events
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| Dec 18, 2014 at 18:33 | comment | added | supercat | @JonCallas: Won't RSA generally fail entirely (i.e. generate public and private "keys" which don't complement each other) if numbers that are supposed to be prime, aren't? Construction of an RSA key pair requires that one knows the prime factorization of the modulus. It need not have exactly two primes, but all primes within it must be known. While one might theoretically find a pair of numbers which aren't prime but yield an encryption/decryption pair, the I think probability of that happening by chance is essentially zero. | |
| Mar 14, 2012 at 3:01 | comment | added | Jon Callas | Thank you for the clarification, poncho. I was trying not to get into the details, but the gist of it. But you are correct, I should have been more weasely. | |
| Mar 6, 2012 at 2:26 | comment | added | poncho | Actually, it's not actually true that "it doesn't matter what prime you use"; certain primes (say, primes where $p-1$ is smooth) are a really bad idea. In addition, it's a good to generate $p$ so that you know a large prime factor $q$, so that you can generate a generator for a subgroup that size. | |
| Mar 6, 2012 at 2:16 | comment | added | Nadim Kobeissi | Thank you! I was wondering - are the primes defined in the RFC special in any other way than being derived from Pi? Have they undergone any other testing? If so, what makes them safer or better studied? | |
| Mar 6, 2012 at 2:07 | history | answered | Jon Callas | CC BY-SA 3.0 |