Thank Rabin and Miller for Your Online Security
We live in a digitally flawed world. Very little of what we see can be truly trusted. But there are some people who have strived to make our world more trusted, and Michael O. Rabin is one of the most predominant. He was born in 1931 in Germany. In the 1960s, he worked at the University of California and MIT and then moved on to a Professorship at Harvard University. Finally, in 1981, he became a professor at the Hebrew University and has worked there ever since.
One of his classic papers [1] built on the work of Gary Miller [2]:
The paper has since provided the core method of generating prime numbers for the RSA method. Typically we generate an odd random number with a given number of bits and then test if it is a prime number. If not, we can keep adding two to the value until we reach a prime number.
Miller-Rabin test for primes
Miller-Rabin test for primes is one of the most popular methods for testing for prime numbers used in RSA…
