Glossary

RSA

RSA (named after its inventors, Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman) is a public-key cryptography algorithm that is widely used for secure communication and for the digital signing and verification of documents. It is based on the mathematical concept of factoring large numbers and is one of the most widely used algorithms in the field of cryptography.

In RSA, a user generates a public key and a private key. The public key is used to encrypt messages, and the private key is used to decrypt them. The public key consists of two large prime numbers that are multiplied together, and the private key is derived from these prime numbers. The security of RSA relies on the difficulty of factoring the product of the two prime numbers.

To encrypt a message using RSA, the sender of the message obtains the recipient's public key and uses it to encrypt the message. The encrypted message, which is referred to as ciphertext, can then be transmitted to the recipient.

To decrypt the message, the recipient uses their private key to decrypt the ciphertext and recover the original message.

RSA is widely used in a variety of applications, including secure communication, digital signatures, and key exchange. It is an important tool for protecting the confidentiality and integrity of communication and for preventing attacks that involve the compromise of keys.