> two unrelated, unassociated people use the same software to generate "good" primes, sometimes they will coincide
I thought the GCD attack's success was more due to the lack of good entropy (randomness) in the random number generation, than due to a lack of eligible primes of the requested length.
This makes much sense -- some people might run the random-number generation on server systems, which often don't have any sources for human input (mouse movements and keystrokes can be a great source of randomness).
Or maybe it's simply a case of people using /dev/urandom instead of /dev/random because it's faster. (Which it is, but it's also not something you want to use for something as important as generating a key for long-term use.)
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> two unrelated, unassociated people use the same software to generate "good" primes, sometimes they will coincide
I thought the GCD attack's success was more due to the lack of good entropy (randomness) in the random number generation, than due to a lack of eligible primes of the requested length.
This makes much sense -- some people might run the random-number generation on server systems, which often don't have any sources for human input (mouse movements and keystrokes can be a great source of randomness).
Or maybe it's simply a case of people using /dev/urandom instead of /dev/random because it's faster. (Which it is, but it's also not something you want to use for something as important as generating a key for long-term use.)