Definition
Sieving refers to a process for selecting candidates for further processing among a set of elements, typically by employing arithmetic progressions to identify candidates to be filtered out.
Theory
When searching for elements in a set with a given property, it is often possible to improve efficiency by filtering out candidates based on simple tests first rather than applying a full test for the property to all elements. A “sieve” is a test that an element must pass to be considered further; “sieving” is the process of applying the tests.
For instance, in the Sieve of Eratosthenes (Prime Number), candidate primes are selected from a range of integers by crossing off elements divisible by small primes 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13,… Crossing off every second, third, fifth, seventh element, and so on is...
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© 2011 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC
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Kaliski, B. (2011). Sieving. In: van Tilborg, H.C.A., Jajodia, S. (eds) Encyclopedia of Cryptography and Security. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-5906-5_435
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-5906-5_435
Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA
Print ISBN: 978-1-4419-5905-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-4419-5906-5
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