ABSTRACT
The RSA algorithm, named after its creators Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman and published in 1977, was one of the first major breakthroughs in asymmetric cryptography. It was developed with the intention to solve the problem of both privacy and digital signatures, and has been the most widely used public-key algorithm since. The Rabin cryptosystem was published by Michael O. Rabin in 1979, and was the first asymmetric algorithm that was provably secure. Asymmetric or public-key cryptography was first publicly introduced by W. Diffie, M. Hellman, and R. Merkle in 1976. Key exchange schemes are used to exchange symmetric keys between two users over an insecure channel. Digital signature schemes are complementary in terms of their usage of keys—the private key is used to encrypt a message and the public key for decryption.
