ABSTRACT
The problem of distinguishing prime numbers from composite numbers and of resolving the latter into their prime factors is known to be one of the most important and useful in arithmetic. C. F. Gauss5.1
The problem of primality testing covered in Chapter 4 is less difficult, in general, than the topic of this chapter. We have already learned that public-key cryptosystems such as RSA, base their security upon the presumed difficulty of integer factorization, a term that we now make precise.
