RSA (short for Rivest–Shamir–Adleman) is one of the most widely used public-key encryption algorithms for secure data transmission. Named after Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman, who publicly described the algorithm in 1977, RSA is used to securely transmit messages over the internet. As an asymmetric cryptosystem, RSA uses a pair of keys: a public key, which can be shared openly, and a private key, which must be kept secret. This allows anyone to encrypt messages using the public key, but only the holder of the private key can decrypt them.
A relatively slow algorithm, RSA’s security relies on the practical difficulty of factoring the product of two large prime numbers, known as the ‘factoring problem’. There are no published methods to defeat the system if a large enough key is used.
Asymmetric cryptography algorithms are widely used in cryptocurrencies. For example, a wallet address is created from a public key, and only those who have the private key are able to access the account.
