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> From: Alexandre Oliva <oliva@dcc.unicamp.br> > Date: 22 Apr 1999 11:55:44 -0300 > > On Apr 22, 1999, Andrew Haley <aph@pasanda.cygnus.co.uk> wrote: > > > The technique of simply adding 2 until a prime is reached is pretty > > much standard in crypto, and with crypto-sized BigIntegers the > > deviation from a uniform distribution is insignificantly small. > > But we're not talking about crypto-sized BigIntegers, we're talking > about the BigInteger class. It's supposed to be general-purpose, not > exclusive for use for cryptography. I think that's the heart of this disagreement. I think that BigInteger is a crypto library in disguise, intended so that Java may be used for Internet commerce. I think that's why the exact method for generating random primes isn't exactly specified, so that implementors may do the most efficient thing. I accept that's not what the standard actually says. ;-) > assuming that isProbablePrime takes constant time for a constant > bitLength. Mm. It would be a very bad implementation of isProbablePrime that took constant time for a constant bitLength. Andrew.