RSA was invented in 1977 by Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adelman, hence the name Rivest–Shamir–Adleman (RSA). This type of public key cryptography is based on the integer factorization problem, where the multiplication of two large prime numbers is easy, but it is difficult to factor it (the result of multiplication, product) back to the two original numbers.
The crux of the work involved with the RSA algorithm is during the key generation process. An RSA key pair is generated by performing the following steps:
- Modulus generation:
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- Select p and q, which are very large prime numbers
- Multiply p and q, n=p.q to generate modulus n
- Generate co-prime:
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- Assume a number called e.
- e should satisfy a certain condition; that is, ...
