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The RSA cipher is the most important implementation of public-key cryptography. It was developed by Len Adleman, Ron Rivest and Adi Shamir, three professors from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Laboratory for Computer Science in Boston. The crucial breakthrough was made by Ron Rivest, but appreciating that the research was very much a joint effort, he was planning to call the cipher ARS, the initials of the three inventors in alphabetical order.
Adleman felt uncomfortable about his name being first, as it was Ron Rivest who had the crucial insight. 'I told Ron to take my name off the paper,' recalls Adleman. 'I told him that it was his invention, not mine. But Ron refused and we got into a discussion about it. ' I went back the next day and suggested to Ron that I be the third author. I recall thinking that this paper will be the least interesting paper that I will ever be on.'
Adleman could not have been more wrong. The system, renamed RSA (Rivest, Shamir, Adleman), went on to become the most influential cipher in modern cryptography.
The invention of RSA was announced in August 1977, when Martin Gardner wrote an article entitled 'A new kind of cipher that would take millions of years to break' for his 'Mathematical games' column in Scientific American. Gardner did not have space to explain the nitty-gritty of RSA, and instead he asked readers to write to MIT, who in turn would send back a technical memorandum that had just been prepared. Rivest, Shamir and Adleman were astonished by the 3,000 requests they received.
However, they did not respond immediately, because they were concerned that public distribution of their idea might jeopardise their chances of getting a patent. When the patent issues were eventually resolved, they held a celebratory party, at which professors and students consumed pizzas and beer while stuffing envelopes with technical memoranda for the readers of Scientific American.
RSA Data Security Inc, the company formed to commercialise the cipher, is now a multi-billion-dollar corporation. The security of e-commerce and the privacy of e-mail depends on RSA. It has enabled the internet to flourish.
The birth of the RSA cipher
What is public-key cryptography?
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