Key, Letter Holders

In cryptography, RSA is an algorithm for public-key cryptography. It was the first algorithm known to be suitable for signing as well as encryption, and one of the first great advances in public key cryptography. more...

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RSA is widely used in electronic commerce protocols, and is believed to be secure given sufficiently long keys and the use of up-to-date implementations.

History

The algorithm was publicly described in 1977 by Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman at MIT; the letters RSA are the initials of their surnames. Apocryphally , it was invented at a Passover Seder in Schenectady, N.Y.

Clifford Cocks, a British mathematician working for the UK intelligence agency GCHQ, described an equivalent system in an internal document in 1973, but given the relatively expensive computers needed to implement it at the time, it was mostly considered a curiosity and, as far as is publicly known, was never deployed. His discovery, however, was not revealed until 1997 due to its top-secret classification, and Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman devised RSA independently of Cocks' work.

MIT was granted US patent 4405829 for a "Cryptographic communications system and method" that used the algorithm in 1983. The patent expired on 21 September 2000. Since a paper describing the algorithm had been published in August 1977, prior to the December 1977 filing date of the patent application, regulations in much of the rest of the world precluded patents elsewhere and only the US patent was granted. Had Cocks' work been publicly known, a patent in the US would not have been possible either.

Operation

RSA involves a public key and a private key. The public key can be known to everyone and is used for encrypting messages. Messages encrypted with the public key can only be decrypted using the private key. The keys for the RSA algorithm are generated the following way:

Choose two distinct large random prime numbers Read more at Wikipedia.org