What do the letters in the cybersecurity algorithm name RSA represent?

RSA represents Rivest, Shamir and Adleman, the surnames of its three inventors.

Ronald Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman introduced the public-key cryptosystem in 1977. RSA uses a pair of mathematically related keys: a public key that can be shared and a private key that is kept secret. This design supports encryption and digital signatures.

Its security relies on the practical difficulty of factoring the product of two large prime numbers. Multiplication is easy when the primes are known, but recovering those primes from the product is much harder with suitably large keys and classical computing methods.

RSA became one of the best-known public-key systems and influenced secure communications, authentication and digital certificates. It is not the only cryptographic algorithm used on the Internet, and modern systems often use newer methods for efficiency or resistance to future quantum attacks.