Sorry, I saw a similar post about prime numbers and didn’t want to hijack the thread. 😀
In: Technology
Prime numbers have special properties involving what are called mathematical fields… it’s basically a number system where only whole numbers are allowed, starting with 0 and only going up to a certain number. Like, in a “modulo 10” field, only the numbers 0 through 9 (a total of 10 numbers) are allowed, and 9 + 1 equals 0.
Well if you use a prime number instead of 10, certain things become true that otherwise couldn’t be relied upon. It’s a fair bit of math, but RSA famously uses 2 prime numbers and the properties of these weird number ranges to make encryption.
Normally “encryption” requires both parties to know the password, but getting that password to an otherwise unknown party is a problem. RSA is special because it was really the first encryption scheme where you had 2 passwords, one for encrypting and one for decrypting, and one password would not be useful for the wrong operation nor would it give away the other password.
Now RSA isn’t the only user of prime numbers, but it’s the most well known, as it’s existed for over 40 years now. RSA made it necessary for computers to be able to find a random prime number in a certain size range fairly quickly in order to build the encryption keys.
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