
300 ◾ Computing
30.3 RSA CRYPTOGRAPHY
In 1977, Ron Linn Rivest (1947–), Adi Shamir (1952–), and Leonard Max
Adleman (1945–) discovered a specic one-way trapdoor function. Rivest
and Shamir are computer scientists, and Adleman is a mathematician,
who was working on cryptography at MIT. In 1978, their public-key
cryptography paper was published [9], and it is now referred to as the
RSA cryptosystem , which stands for the rst letters of Rivest, Shamir,
and Adleman. eir one-way function is based on an amazingly simple
number-theoretic idea, and yet it has successfully resisted all cryptana-
lytic attacks. e RSA (Rivest–Shamir–Adleman ...