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Edit: The quoted question addresses only numbers of the form $p^a q^b$, I asked a general question for arbitrary $n$.


If $n$ is a prime or a product of 2 primes then knowing its totient $\varphi(n)$ allows us immediately to find the prime factorization of $n$.

How about a general case? Does knowing $\varphi(n)$

  1. give us a way how to find the prime factorization of $n$,
  2. help as find a prime factor of $n$, or at least
  3. help at in finding any factor of $n$? (This turns out to be obvious.)
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    If http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmichael%27s_totient_function_conjecture is true, there are at least two numbers having same totient value.2012-09-06

3 Answers 3

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In fact, it is a well-known observation in cryptography that just knowing a multiple of $\phi(n)$ helps greatly in factoring $n$, regardless of the number of prime factors (if there's only one or two primes dividing $n$ then this has already been covered).

Suppose $m$ is a multiple of $\phi(n)$. Then if you factor out enough powers of $2$ from $m$, there must exist a divisor $t = m/(2^r)$ such that $\lambda(n) \mid 2t$ but $\lambda(n) \nmid t$. (Here, $\lambda(n)$ is the Carmichael function, which will necessarily be even, unless $n$ is trivially small.)

It will then be the case that for some bases $b$, $b$ will be a quadratic residue for some prime $p \mid n$ but not for a different $q \mid n$. In this case, taking the GCD $(b^t-1,n)$ will produce a non-trivial factor of $n$.

One simply has to randomly try different values of $b$ (the expected number of tries is finite), as well as different choices of $t$ (there are at most $\log(n)$ possibilities, and one can use successive squaring to efficiently cover them).

To get all the prime factors of $n$, just keep repeating the process (we still have a multiple of $\phi$ for each of factors found above).

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    Why the downvote? This is the only actual answer to the question.2013-06-19
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In the case of a prime, you can just observe that $\phi(n)=n-1$ to know it is prime. If $n=pq$ is a product to two primes, $\phi(n)=(p-1)(q-1)$, which you still need to factor. If you already know it is the product of two primes, you can use $\phi(n)=n-p-q+1$ to get $p+q$ as a second equation. As $\phi(n)$ has at least a couple factors of $2$ and may have other small factors, it will be somewhat smaller and can be easy to factor. Hagen von Eitzen makes a good point in the comment. If $n=pqr$, all prime, $\phi(n)=(p-1)(q-1)(r-1)$ and I don't see a good way to make headway except looking for small factors.

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    Does it help that the prime factors of $p-1,q-1,r-1$ are all likely to be orders of magnitude smaller than $p$, $q$, and $r$? If you then invest in factoring $\phi(n)$, then you have a finite number of combinations of those factors to check to see if they correspond to a factorization $pqr$. Maybe this is not efficient. I wonder what the statistics are on the size of primes dividing $\phi(n)$ versus of those dividing $n$.2013-06-19
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If $p^e$ divides $n$ then $p^{e-1}$ divides $\phi(n)$.