RSA encryption | Definition, Example, & Facts (2024)

RSA encryption, in full Rivest-Shamir-Adleman encryption, type of public-key cryptography widely used for data encryption of e-mail and other digital transactions over the Internet. RSA is named for its inventors, Ronald L. Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard M. Adleman, who created it while on the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In the RSA system, a user secretly chooses a pair of prime numbers p and q so large that factoring the product n=pq is well beyond projected computing capabilities for the lifetime of the ciphers. As of 2015, U.S. government security standards call for the modulus to be at least 2,048 bits in size—i.e., p and q each have to be about 308 decimal digits in size, so n is roughly a 617-digit number. Since the largest hard numbers that can currently be factored are only half this size and since the difficulty of factoring roughly doubles for each additional three digits in the modulus, 617-digit moduli are believed to be safe from factoring for several decades.

Having chosen p and q, the user selects an arbitrary integer e less than n and relatively prime to p−1 and q−1—that is, so that 1 is the only factor in common between e and the product (p−1)(q−1). This assures that there is another number d for which the product ed will leave a remainder of 1 when divided by the least common multiple of p−1 and q−1. With knowledge of p and q, the number d can easily be calculated using the Euclidean algorithm. If one does not know p and q, it is equally difficult to find either e or d given the other as to factor n, which is the basis for the cryptosecurity of the RSA algorithm.

The labels d and e will be used to denote the function to which a key is put, but, as keys are completely interchangeable, this is only a convenience for exposition. To implement a secrecy channel using the standard two-key version of the RSA cryptosystem, user A would publish e and n in an authenticated public directory but keep d secret. Anyone wishing to send a private message to A would encode it into numbers less than n and then encrypt it using a special formula based on e and n. A can decrypt such a message based on knowing d, but the presumption—and evidence thus far—is that for almost all ciphers no one else can decrypt the message unless one can also factor n.

Similarly, to implement an authentication channel, user A would publish d and n and keep e secret. In the simplest use of this channel for identity verification, user B can verify that B is in communication with A by looking in the directory to find A’s decryption key d and sending A a message to be encrypted. If B gets back a cipher that decrypts to B’s challenge message using d to decrypt it, B will know that it was in all probability created by someone knowing e and hence that the other communicant is probably A.

Digitally signing a message is a more complex operation and requires a cryptosecure “hashing” function. This is a publicly known function that maps any message into a smaller message—called a digest—in which each bit of the digest is dependent on every bit of the message in such a way that changing even one bit in the message is apt to change, in a cryptosecure way, half of the bits in the digest. By cryptosecure it is meant that it is computationally infeasible for anyone to find a message that will produce a preassigned digest and equally hard to find another message with the same digest as a known one. To sign a message—which may not even need to be kept secret—A encrypts the digest with the secret e, which A appends to the message. Anyone can then decrypt the message using the public key d to recover the digest, which one can also compute independently from the message. If the two agree, one must conclude that A originated the cipher, since only A knew e and hence could have encrypted the message.

Thus far, all proposed two-key cryptosystems exact a very high price for the separation of the privacy or secrecy channel from the authentication or signature channel. The greatly increased amount of computation involved in the asymmetric encryption/decryption process significantly cuts the channel capacity (bits per second of message information communicated). For roughly 20 years, for comparably secure systems, it has been possible to achieve a throughput 1,000 to 10,000 times higher for single-key than for two-key algorithms. As a result, the main application of two-key cryptography is in hybrid systems. In such a system a two-key algorithm is used for authentication and digital signatures or to exchange a randomly generated session key to be used with a single-key algorithm at high speed for the main communication. At the end of the session this key is discarded.