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Safe Primes, Goldilocks and Riddinghood

As a cryptography professor, I spend a good deal of my time dealing with prime numbers. Basically they are at the core of public key signing and used to encrypt things, prove identities, and also to prove the credibility of digital signatures. So, as you may remember, a prime number is only divisible by itself and 1. So, 15 isn’t prime, but 17 is. In a recent version of Pointless on the TV, there was even a question on…