The types of primes found by GIMPS are so incredibly huge
that they would
have no practical purpose for encryption.
Nope, there is a crypto system using the Mersennes. Look for
a link to it
at www.mersenne.org. (It is also mentioned in one of the Mxx
press releases
from George... or at
There are presently three families of public key cryptographic algorithms.
Only the IF (Integer Factorization) family is based on the concept of using
the product of two primes where these primes must be kept secret. The other
two families DL (Discrete Logarithm) and EC (Elliptic Curve) are