ABSTRACT
The most widely used public key cryptographic system is RSA, named after Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Len Adleman. It was developed in 1977, a year after the Diffie-Hellman paper appeared. The public encryption key uses the product of two large primes, and its security rests on the difficulty of being able to factor that product and retrieve the primes. The influence of RSA on number theory has been enormous. It showed that number theory, long assumed to be a purely theoretical branch of mathematics, and has important practical applications. For example, since the security of the RSA system is closely tied to the difficulty of factoring, the development of factorization algorithms has received a lot of attention, and computational problems have become much more popular. One of the uses of RSA is to transmit keys for use in symmetric cryptosystems.
