On Thu, Jul 27, 2000 at 03:00:16PM -0400, Arnold G. Reinhold wrote:
> I like "Biprime Cryptography," or maybe "Biprime Public Key
> Cryptography," where a biprime is defined as the product of two prime
> numbers. I doesn't get close to any trademark and it is descriptive
> of the algorithm.
Sounds like "composite modulus cryptography" which I think has been
mentioned on the crypto lists before.
"Biprime cryptography" is not really accurate, because RSA doesn't
require that the modulus be the product of two primes. I seem to
remember someone (I think it was Richard Schroeppel) a few years ago
advocating RSA with a three-prime modulus. The idea was that having
three primes instead of two would not weaken the algorithm in any
practical way, but it could make CRT operations even faster. It
wouldn't make the number field sieve any easier because the number of
primes doesn't affect NFS workfactor. It would make (I think) the
quadratic sieve more efficient, but at normal keysizes (1024 bits?) the
three primes would all be large enough that quadratic sieve would still
be less efficient than the number field sieve.
