About

It was invented in 1977 by Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman, and has since become one of the most popular encryption algorithms globally. The RSA cryptosystem utilizes public-key cryptography, which means that it uses two different keys: a public key for encryption, and a private key for decryption. The security of the system lies in the fact that it is computationally difficult to derive the private key from the public key. In RSA, users generate a pair of keys: a public key that can be freely shared with anyone, and a private key that must be kept secret. The public key can be used to encrypt messages, while the private key is required to decrypt them. Encryption involves raising the plaintext message to the power of the public key and taking the modulus of the result, while decryption requires raising the encrypted message to the power of the private key and taking the modulus. The strength of RSA lies in the fact that factorizing large numbers into primes is an extremely computationally intensive task, especially as the numbers involved become larger and larger. This complexity makes RSA resistant to attacks and ensures the security of encrypted messages, as long as the private key remains undisclosed. However, it is worth noting that RSA is susceptible to attacks if an adversary manages to factorize the modulus into its prime factors. The RSA cryptosystem has found a wide range of applications, particularly in secure communication protocols such as SSL/TLS, SSH, and PGP. It has become a fundamental building block in modern cryptography and is widely regarded as a secure and efficient encryption algorithm. Its inventors were awarded the Turing Award in 2002 for their contributions to the field of cryptography.