this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2024
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That segment exists. That's literally why they are continually trying to find larger primes.
Again, to what use?
No idea, I'm neither a cryptographer nor mathematician. All I know is that they're used somehow. Something about multiplying two large primes to get a big number. Apparently it's a challenge to factor that number to derive the original primes, and that challenge is what makes breaking a cryptographic algorithm difficult.
Any cryptography you're likely to encounter uses fixed size primes over a residue ring for performance reasons. These superlarge primes aren't relevant for practical cryptography, they're just fun.