The name RSA comes from the three men who developed the cryptosystem in 1977 while working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Ronald Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman. A U.S. patent for the algorithm was issued in 1983 to MIT. It has since been licensed by hundreds of companies and is used in a range of digital certificatebased applications and protocols, including:
The name RSA comes from the three men who developed the cryptosystem in
1977 while working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Ronald
Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman. A U.S. patent for the algorithm
was issued in 1983 to MIT. It has since been licensed by hundreds of companies
and is used in a range of digital certificate-based applications and protocols,
including:
Public-key infrastructures — PKIs issue, track and revoke digital certificates
that are used to authenticate and secure digital transactions.
Secure Sockets Layer — SSL is the most common way of providing security
via the World Wide Web. It provides end-to-end, operating system-independent
encryption and authentication between clients and servers.
Secure Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions — Secure MIME, or S/MIME,
is the standard method of sending secure e-mail. S/MIME is supported by
Netscape Communications Corp. and Microsoft Corp. mail clients, by Lotus
Development Corp. and Novell Inc. products, and by many other applications
and companies.
Signed Extensible Markup Language — XML is becoming the new standard format
for Internet-based documents. Signed XML is a way to enable authors or
sources of XML documents to use digital certificates to prove that they
actually are who they claim to be.
NEXT STORY: Drive IT with dollars, not dictates