Are large prime numbers kept secret?

110 Views Asked by At

I've read several times that modern cryptography is based on the fact that multiplying two primes is easy, whereas getting the prime factorization of a random big integer is very hard. (see here)

Does it mean that the largest prime numbers known are kept secret, for cryptography purposes ?

If they were not, one could compute the product of every pair of known prime numbers and decode the public keys ?