RSA

: This article is about the RSA cryptosystem. For other meanings, see RSA (disambiguation).

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In cryptography, RSA is an algorithm for public key encryption. It was the first algorithm known to be suitable for signing as well as encryption, and one of the first great advances in public key cryptography. RSA is still widely used in electronic commerce protocols, and is believed to be secure given sufficiently long keys.

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The algorithm was described in 1977 by Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Len Adleman at MIT; the letters RSA are the initials of their surnames.

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Clifford Cocks, a British mathematician working for GCHQ, described an equivalent system in an internal document in 1973. Given the relatively expensive computers needed to implement it at the time it was mostly considered a curiosity and, as far as is publicly known, was never deployed. His discovery, however, was not revealed until 1997 due to its top-secret classification.

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Public key encryption: REDIRECT Public-key cryptography...