RSA

Rivest Shamir Adleman

RSA is a public-key cryptosystem that is widely used for secure data transmission. Messages are encrypted with a public key, which can be shared openly. With the RSA algorithm, once a message has been encrypted with the public key, it can only be decrypted by a private (or secret) key. Each RSA user has a key pair consisting of their public and private keys. As the name suggests, the private key must be kept secret. The acronym RSA comes from the surnames of Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman, who publicly described the algorithm in 1977.

• Abbreviation: RSA