Strong Security and Privacy of data across the Internet in this day and age is of vital importance because we live in world where hackers are more skilled at cracking code and ensuring data breaches to steal confidential information. This creates havoc, and lets be honest, a lot of lawsuits.
Some of the most powerful encryption algorithms today are used in several industries across the world to make sure sensitive information isn't given out to the public (yes, your weird pictures on the Cloud included). Let's talk about the RSA algorithm in this post, the most powerful algorithm out there.
The RSA Algorithm
Also known as the Rivest-Shamir-Adleman, the RSA algorithm is an Asymmetric Algorithm (two different keys are used). Asymmetric cryptography is also known as public key cryptography where one key can be given to anyone and the other key remains private. One of these keys encrypts the information(the public one) and the other decrypts it (the private one).
It supports incredibly key lengths, such as 2048- and 4096- bit keys, which in turn makes cracking the algorithm harder.
RSA is in widespread use, but it isn’t typically used to encode the actual data that passes through the internet. It is a very slow algorithm, which means it is unsuitable for encrypting web traffic.
RSA is mainly used to encrypt the keys of another algorithm. One which is symmetric, but much faster. This means that the other algorithm only has one key for both encrypting and decrypting data. Even though it is very secure, if the key gets out the whole thing falls apart. So, RSA enables us to use fast symmetric encryption algorithms on public networks such as the internet.
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