Whose Encryption Secures the Internet?

In 1977, MIT researchers Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman published the RSA algorithm, the first practical public-key cryptosystem. RSA allows two parties to communicate securely without ever sharing a secret key: one key encrypts (public), and a different, mathematically linked key decrypts (private). Its security relies on the difficulty of factoring the product of two very large prime numbers. RSA became the backbone of internet security — used in SSL/TLS protocols, digital signatures, and secure email. Today, RSA is gradually being supplemented by elliptic-curve cryptography and post-quantum algorithms, but it remains one of the most important inventions in computer science.