A secure marker

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.