RSA
Among the cryptography algorithms, RSA shines like a star. Its beauty is equal to its logical simplicity and hidden inside is such a force that after 40 years, it's still used to protect more than 80 percent of commercial transactions in the world.
Its acronym is made up of the names of its three inventors – Rivest, Shamir, and Aldemar. RSA is what we call the perfect asymmetric algorithm. Actually, in 1997, the CESG, an English cryptography agency, attributed the invention of public-key encryption to James Allis in 1970 and the same agency declared that in 1973, a document was written by Clifford Cocks that demonstrates a similar version of the RSA algorithm.
The essential concept of the asymmetric algorithm is that the keys for encryption and decryption are different.
Recalling the analogy to padlocks I made in the The Diffie-Hellman algorithm section, when I described the D-H algorithm, we saw that anybody (not just Alice and Bob) could lock the box with...