[shinycode]

From what I remember in my math class where we made those cryptography calculations by hand, the teacher many years ago said that the day we could guess prime numbers it will be a disaster because many cryptographic calculations are based on the premise that we can’t guess prime numbers. I don’t know if that changed ?

[PeeMcGee]

It's easy to find primes of a given bit length, and it's easy to multiply them together. It's hard to un-multiply a given number (public key) into its unique prime factors (private key).

[mbreese]

But if we could more easily find primes, the search space for finding those prime factors would be significantly smaller.

In my mind, it’s not a question of easy vs hard… it’s a question of fast vs slow. The default algorithm for finding primes is pretty simple, but it takes a lot of math and time. If you reduce the time requirements, then we start to get into trouble.