RSA
/ˌɑːr-ɛs-ˈeɪ/
n. “Keys, math, and a little bit of trust.”
RSA is one of the most well-known public-key cryptosystems, named after its inventors Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman. Introduced in 1977, it allows secure communication over insecure channels without requiring the sender and receiver to share a secret key in advance. Instead, RSA uses a pair of mathematically linked keys: a public key for encryption and a private key for decryption.