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...
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2011 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC
About this entry
Cite this entry
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
Download citation
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
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceReference Module Computer Science and Engineering