RSA

Short for Rivest, Shamir, Adelman, RSA is an encryption system developed by Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman at RSA Data Security, Inc, which is now part of EMC.

RSA works by multiplying two prime numbers together to generate a semiprime, which creates a public key. For someone to decrypt the message, they would need to determine the two prime numbers used to create the semiprime. With large prime numbers, it is extremely complex and time intensive to determine those two numbers.

Algorithm, Computer acronyms, Encryption, Public key cryptography, Security terms