RSA encryption
Cifrado RSA
- Date
- 1977 · confidence high
- Place
- MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
- Credited to
- Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman (MIT)
- People
- 👤 Adi Shamir1952–👤 Leonard Adleman1945–👤 Ronald Rivest1947–
- Field
- Knowledge & symbols
⚠️ Disputed: the sources disagree.
What it is
First practical public-key system, based on the difficulty of factoring the product of two large primes, which allows encryption and signing. It protects most secure connections on the internet.
Clifford Cocks (GCHQ) described an equivalent system in 1973, kept secret until 1997.
What it led to
- Digital certificates and the HTTPS infrastructure
- Legally valid electronic signatures
- The quantum threat (Shor's algorithm) and post-quantum cryptography