:: GussetBLOG ::

:: Friday, January 17, 2003 ::

Call me a geek, but I've just been reading about using prime numbers in cryptography and was amazed at some of the stats:

There are approximately 10¹⁵¹ primes 512-bits in length or less. There are only 1077 atoms in the universe. If every atom in the universe needed a billion new primes every microsecond from the beginning of time until now, you would only need 10¹⁰⁹ primes. (not sure where that 1077 atoms thing comes from)

If someone creates a database of all primes, won’t he be able to use that database to break public-key algorithms? Yes, but he can’t do it. If you could store one gigabyte of information on a drive weighing one gram, then a list of just the 512-bit primes would weight so much that it would exceed the Chandrasekhar limit and collapse into a black hole, so you couldn’t retrieve the data anyway.

If you're sad, like me, then you can go here and read more

:: popcorn 17.1.03 [Arc]    ::
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