Rivest–Shamir–Adleman (RSA)

In 1977, three young scientists Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) took the concept of public-key cryptography and developed an algorithm we called as the RSA algorithm. Using the first letters of their last names, they derived RSA. This algorithm uses public key cryptography (also called asymmetric encryption), so it uses two different keys to encrypt and decrypt data. In RSA, a pair of keys generated where one key revealed to the external world, known as a public key, and the other one kept a secret to the user, known as a private key. They developed this algorithm to address two key issues: create secure communications without having to trust a separate key distribution coordinator with your key and to verify a message comes intact from the claimed sender.

Basic concept of RSA

In asymmetric key cryptography, it generates a pair of keys. The public key is getting published on other hands the private key keep remaining secret. These two keys are numerically linked to each other. Since it generates these keys using a one-way function, it is impossible to generate a private key after knowing the public key, and vice versa. A message encrypted through a key is not practical to decrypt using a similar key. Hence, the secrecy of a message remains secured.

Let us assume that Alice and Bob need to transfer secret messages between themselves using the RSA algorithm. They first generate their proper key sets and publish the public key so that the other body can access it.
The denotations of their public and private keys are as follow :

Public-A and Private-A for Alice

Public-B and Private-B for Bob


When Alice sends a message to Bob, she encrypts the message(M) using Public-B and generates a ciphertext(C) using formula:

C = Public-B(M)


After receiving Cipher-B, Bob can decrypt the message employing his private key, Private-B. This can be formally expressed as:

M = Private-B(C)


Each of the parties keeps his or her private key secret from each other. Consequently, a message that is encrypted using the public key can only be decrypted with its relevant private key.