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CRYPTOGRAPHY

What is RSA
cryptography?

What is RSA cryptography?

RSA stands for Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman— the men who first publicly described the algorithm in 1977.

RSA cryptography is based on the presumed difficulty of factoring large integers (integer factorization). Full decryption of an RSA ciphertext is thought to be infeasible on the assumption that no efficient algorithm exists for integer factorization.

A user of RSA Cryptography creates and then publishes the product of two large prime numbers, along with an auxiliary value, as their public key. The prime factors must be kept secret. Anyone can use the public key to encrypt a message, but only someone with knowledge of the prime factors can feasibly decode the message.