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Commit 6b1fbfe5 authored by Simon Tatham's avatar Simon Tatham
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PrimeCandidateSource: add Sophie Germain filtering.

A Sophie Germain prime is a prime p such that 2p+1 is also prime. The
larger prime of the pair 2p+1 is also known as a 'safe prime', and is
the preferred kind of modulus for conventional Diffie-Hellman.

Generating these is harder work than normal prime generation. There's
not really much of a technique except to just keep generating
candidate primes p and then testing 2p+1. But what you _can_ do to
speed things up is to get the prime-candidate generator to help a bit:
it's already enforcing that no small prime divides p, and it's easy to
get it to also enforce that no small prime divides 2p+1. That check
can filter out a lot of bad candidates early, before you waste time on
the more expensive checks, so you have a better chance of success with
each number that gets as far as Miller-Rabin.

Here I add an extra setup function for PrimeCandidateSource which
enables those extra checks. After you call pcs_try_sophie_germain(),
the PCS will only deliver you numbers for which both p and 2p+1 are
free of small factors.
parent 18fd47b6
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