In the context of a new largest (mersenne) prime number being found this week -
The largest known prime number is now 2^57,885,161 − 1
, and it took 5 years to find it since the last largest prime was found.
But we know that various asymmetric encryption algorithms require ridiculously large primes which are used as the infamous p
and q
factors. For example, 1024-bit RSA would require two 512-bit primes.
But this article, if correct, claims we are able to enumerate no more than ~1.7M
prime numbers.
How does this settle with cryptographic prime number generation?