Question

I’m looking for a way to generate large random numbers on the order of 2^64 in C… (100000000 – 999999999), to use in a public key encryption algorithm (as p and q).

I do not want to generate a number smaller than 2^64 (that is, smaller than 100000000).

Is there anything that could help me to do this?

Answer 1

random() returns a long which on a 64bit system should be 64 bits. If you are on a 32bit system you could do the following:

#include <inttypes.h>

uint64_t num;

/* add code to seed random number generator */

num = rand();
num = (num << 32) | rand();

// enforce limits of value between 100000000 and 999999999
num = (num % (999999999 - 100000000)) + 100000000;

Alternatively on a NIX system you could read /dev/random into your buffer:

#include <sys/types.h>
#include <sys/stat.h>
#include <fcntl.h>
#include <inttypes.h>   

int fd;
uint64_t num; 
if ((fd = open("/dev/random", O_RDONLY) == -1)
{
    /* handle error */
};
read(fd, &num, 8);
close(fd);

// enforce limits of value between 100000000 and 999999999
num = (num % (999999999 - 100000000)) + 100000000;

A