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Re:All Mersenne prime exponents below 100m tested at least once by Blahah on Friday December 04, 2020 @04:22PM (#25308204)
> not secret

Clearly, no smaller primes are secret either, nor are they so numerous that iterating over them is computationally difficult. And mathematically, anyone can discover primes. Why does it matter whether primes are secret?

Re:All Mersenne prime exponents below 100m tested at least once by IvyMike on Friday December 04, 2020 @04:59PM (#25308716)
> ...nor are they so numerous that iterating over them is computationally difficult

That's not correct; for a given bound x, the expected number of primes is x/ln(x).

For example, if you need to choose a prime of 100 digits, there are something like 10^96 of them; you can find a random one using probabilistic methods, do your cryptography, and know that your attacker would have to try 10^96 primes to break it. Since they can't really do this, this is not the weak point of your cryptosystem.

If you chose a Mersenne prime, there are only 51 of them. Your attacker would have to try less than 10^2 of them.

Re:All Mersenne prime exponents below 100m tested at least once by centimeter on Friday December 04, 2020 @04:34PM (#25308387)
Some cryptosystems like RSA are based on secret primes. Density of primes is about 1/log(n), so there are plenty of primes to choose from.

Some cryptosystems like ECDSA are based on secret elements selected from a field, and the primes there are public.

Re:All Mersenne prime exponents below 100m tested at least once by Blahah on Friday December 04, 2020 @04:43PM (#25308496)
Sorry, just to be clear, they are obscure, not secret. Anyone can compute primes. No prime is secret.
Re:All Mersenne prime exponents below 100m tested at least once by ifdefdebug on Friday December 04, 2020 @04:50PM (#25308594)
Like in: anyone can combine characters. No password is secret?
Re:All Mersenne prime exponents below 100m tested at least once by segfaultbuserr on Friday December 04, 2020 @09:38PM (#25311159)
They are secret. "Secret key" is a technical term in cryptography, and there are thousands of research papers published with this term [0], including a paper by Eli Biham and Adi Shamir on "Differential fault analysis of secret key cryptosystems". Using you believe that you are more knowledgeable in crypto than Adi Shamir (The "S" in "RSA") and insist on using an alternative definition of "secret" not accepted by cryptographers and infosec researchers, there should be no problem using the word "secret".

Otherwise, reductio ad absurdum, Following the same line of logic, all cryptography is "security through obscurity" because there exists a secret key, which is not incorrect. The practice of hiding the design of a system is obscurity, the practice of hiding a specific key to a ciphertext is security, not obscurity, as long as the method of generating and using it is publicly available. If there's nothing to reverse engineer, there can be no obscurity. The method of finding a symmetric key or finding a RSA key is well-known, not obscured, it's simply the size of the problem is not computationally tractable in practice by today's computers.

[0] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=secret+key

Re:All Mersenne prime exponents below 100m tested at least once by grifball on Friday December 04, 2020 @05:02PM (#25308772)
I guess I don't fully understand this, but RSA works so there MUST be "secret" primes (as in, then can be randomly generated like a symmetric key can).
Re:All Mersenne prime exponents below 100m tested at least once by MichaelBurge on Saturday December 05, 2020 @07:24AM (#25314027)
All natural numbers are computable, and everything on a computer is represented as a natural number, so nothing on a computer can be secret.