SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the for-sufficiently-large-polynomials dept.
From Quantamagazine
Digital security depends on the difficulty of factoring large numbers. A new proof shows why one method for breaking digital encryption won't work.
Virtually all polynomials of a certain type are "prime," meaning they can't be factored.
The proof has implications for many areas of pure mathematics. It's also great news for a pillar of modern life: digital encryption.
The main technique we use to keep digital information secure is RSA encryption. It's a souped-up version of the encryption scheme a seventh grader might devise to pass messages to a friend: Assign a number to every letter and multiply by some secretly agreed-upon key. To decode a message, just divide by the secret key.
Quite a statement by the researchers. This allegedly makes RSA encryption "quantum proof", and if so means that classical encryption may still be with us long after quantum computing arrives. Given that quantum systems require expensive entanglement setups, it may also mean that a cheap encryption method may stay viable.
Paper: Irreducibility of random polynomials of large degree
(Score: 3, Interesting) by khallow on Thursday December 20 2018, @07:54AM
No, because we already know the crude distribution of primes. For example, it's known that the sum of the reciprocal of primes (1/p for prime p) diverges. That implies the existence of enough primes to make this not a problem (for example, the growth in size of the number of the first N primes on average is less than the power of N^a, for any a>1, but near 1).