Pentium bug and CRYPTO

Timothy C. May tcmay at netcom.com
Mon Nov 21 17:08:49 PST 1994



Claborne, Chris wrote:

> Will the following error (Re Pentium Floating Point Bug     Date: 15 Nov 
> 1994)
> cause problems with PGP key generation or any other normal operations with
> PGP or other crypto.  I'm not a math mathmatics nerd but I know we generally 
> 
> deal with big numbers.

We do indeed deal with "big numbers," but big INTEGER numbers. Whole
numbers.

The Pentium FDIV bug shows up only, so far as is known, with certain
floating point numerator/denominator combinations. No crypto
computation I can imagine would use the FDIV instruction.

--Tim May


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