this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2024
426 points (97.1% liked)
Technology
59378 readers
3669 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I don't understand this and therefore it's stupid and pointless. Fuck you math elitist assholes with your so-called "large" prime numbers spending billions of dollars that could be used to make my life better. I don't comprehend this at all and there it does not matter. The end.
If you want it to be useful for the economy and industry in order to warrant funding, I've got news for you:
The majority of modern encryption relies on prime numbers. It is currently speculated but not known, that the number of prime numbers is infinite.
Should it be proven, that there are only a finite amount of prime numbers, all encryption would become vulnerable.
Many encryption algorithms rely on the assumption that the factorizations of numbers in prime numbers has an exponential cost and not a polynomial cost (I.e. is a NP problem and not P, and we don't know if P != NP although many would bet on it). Whether there are infinite prime numbers or not is really irrelevant in the context you are mentioning, because encryption relies on factorizing finite numbers of relatively fixed sizes.
The problem is that for big numbers like n=p*q (where p and q are both prime) it's expensive to recover p and q given n.
Note that actually more modern ciphers don't rely on this (like elliptic curve crypto).