Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Len Adleman (RSA)
RSA is the most powerful and widely used public key algorithm developed by Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Len Adleman in 1977 at MIT and hence was named in the name of its developers. It was published in the year 1978.
The RSA is accepted all over the world as a powerful algorithm when compared to the symmetric or private key cryptography algorithms, which supports only encryption by using a same key at both ends like DES, Where as public key cryptography provides encryption and authentication at the same time to the end users. These keys are generated mathematically by choosing large prime numbers and the security of the algorithm is difficulty of factoring these large numbers most of the versions of RSA uses 154-digit or 512 bit keys. The selection of large prime numbers and the use of up-to-date implementations make the RSA algorithm more powerful.
The RSA algorithm can be used for both public key encryption and digital signatures. Its security is based on the difficulty of factoring large integers. Here we are going to have a look at the three major operations that an RSA algorithm can perform.
1) Key Generation.
2) Encryption/Decryption.
3) Digital Signing/Signature Verification.
This Project Paper is written & submitted by Deepak V.