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Concept
Primality certificate
Summary
In mathematics and computer science, a primality certificate or primality proof is a succinct, formal proof that a number is prime. Primality certificates allow the primality of a number to be rapidly checked without having to run an expensive or unreliable primality test. "Succinct" usually means that the proof should be at most polynomially larger than the number of digits in the number itself (for example, if the number has b bits, the proof might contain roughly b2 bits).
Primality certificates lead directly to proofs that problems such as primality testing and the complement of integer factorization lie in NP, the class of problems verifiable in polynomial time given a solution. These problems already trivially lie in co-NP. This was the first strong evidence that these problems are not NP-complete, since if they were, it would imply that NP is subset of co-NP, a result widely believed to be false; in fact, this was the first demonstration of a problem in NP intersect co-NP not known, at the time, to be in P.
Producing certificates for the complement problem, to establish that a number is composite, is straightforward: it suffices to give a nontrivial divisor. Standard probabilistic primality tests such as the Baillie–PSW primality test, the Fermat primality test, and the Miller–Rabin primality test also produce compositeness certificates in the event where the input is composite, but do not produce certificates for prime inputs.
The concept of primality certificates was historically introduced by the Pratt certificate, conceived in 1975 by Vaughan Pratt, who described its structure and proved it to have polynomial size and to be verifiable in polynomial time. It is based on the Lucas primality test, which is essentially the converse of Fermat's little theorem with an added condition to make it true:
Lucas' theorem: Suppose we have an integer a such that:
an − 1 ≡ 1 (mod n),
for every prime factor q of n − 1, it is not the case that a(n − 1)/q ≡ 1 (mod n).
Then n is prime.
Official source
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