[_siis]

The modern cryptographic functions we were talking about are all based on primes.

Unless you are suddenly trying to shift gears to muddy the water for some other purpose and apply what I said to 'all cryptography', it was pretty clear what we were talking about prior to this response.

Perhaps you should do a bit more research into the origin of those magic constants that get used to initialize those functions.

Where do you think they come from... yes you could change them but then you wouldn't be following the specification, and you can't legitimately call it the same thing.

AFAIK, they are all in some form related to primes, whether that's a truncation of a floating point representation of a prime or some other operation like a square root of a sequence of primes, because evidence has shown that the chaotic nature of primes works best and this is a property we want in cryptographic systems.

[viraptor]

> origin of those magic constants that get used to initialize those functions.

For others interested, the magic constants are normally truncated binary of a known constant like e or pi, derived from famous texts, roots of small primes, etc. But the reasoning is that these are common, simple to reproduce numbers that can't be chosen to produce desired results. A.k.a "nothing up my sleeve" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing-up-my-sleeve_number

Sha256 is using some prime, but other hashes and systems don't and it doesn't matter at all in this context. They just needed a simple random initial value. I'm half convinced op is trying to use cleverly worded half truths to troll us.

[than3]

If you think I'm trolling then you are jumping at shadows.

You're not the one taking huge karmic hits for taking an unpopular opinion, and a lot of kids are using bots to try to de-amp that, like that even matters. So many people these days (if they aren't bots) regularly commit acts of true evil without even realizing it.

You know what I find really sad. No one can talk about anything because people use voting as a way to punish people based on their shallow feelings rather than the content, if they are even real people at all. Most of the time their bots controlled by a small group of people.

Its sad because to think and express real intelligent thought one must risk being offensive, and to learn one must risk being offended. If you don't allow that, you're stripping people of voice or the ability to become more intelligent which is a true evil.

When those that don't think outnumber those that do, why should any intelligent person try to solve the unintelligent majority's problems? :: shakes head, so shortsighted::

I hope you have a happy holiday despite all the negativity. I blame HN for switching their banner to red, it always brings out the absolute worst in people.

[stouset]

> The modern cryptographic functions we were talking about are all based on primes.

No. They aren’t. Not elliptic curves, not any hash functions, not AES, not ChaCha20, and not any of the post-quantum stuff NIST is tossing about.

RSA is. That’s about it. And RSA is being rapidly phased out.

[shakow]

> AFAIK, they are all in some form related to primes

That's plain wrong. Primes are being phased out in crypto, elliptic curves are decades old at this point, and lattices are everywhere in recent research.