ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors present one of the most well known and popular cryptosystems ever developed, the RSA cryptosystem. The system is named for Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Len Adleman, a trio of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who developed the system and published it publicly in 1978. A couple of reasons why the RSA system is so well known and popular are that it can be constructed to be extremely secure while still being very easy to use, and the mathematics that underlies the system is truly fascinating. However, the main reason why the RSA system is so well known and popular is that when it was published, it was the world’s first public-key cryptosystem. Securely encrypting and decrypting messages using the RSA cryptosystem generally requires modular exponentiation with extremely large bases and exponents.
