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> Are good primes that hard to come by?

My laptop takes around 2 minutes to get a pair of 4k bits primes for DH parameters.

The problem is that people want their installers to be instantaneous. Those 2 minutes are too long.



A popular app could ship with 100 different primes pre baked and pick one at random? Not perfect but 100x better than having one prime.


If those primes are compromised, 100 of them are still useless.


Yes that's only useful under the original assumption of the article: that a state level actor must use a nontrivial part of its budget to factor one prime. The back of the envelope calculations if they did classical factorization is that one or a few 1024bit primes were possible but 100 were not. Of course next year they will have twice the CPU time, or a better quantum computer, so it's a short term win.




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