Cryptography
cryptography
security
encryption
What is RSA?
Definition
RSA (Rivest-Shamir-Adleman) is an asymmetric encryption algorithm that uses a pair of keys: a public key for encryption and a private key for decryption. Its security is based on the mathematical difficulty of factoring large prime numbers.
Why It Matters
RSA is the foundation of SSL/TLS handshakes, SSH authentication, digital signatures, and email encryption (PGP/GPG). While not used for bulk data encryption (AES is faster), RSA secures the key exchange that establishes encrypted connections.