RSA

Rivest-Shamir-Adleman is a highly secure cryptography method by RSA Data Security, Inc., Redwood City, CA, at http://www.rsa.com. It uses a two-part key. The owner keeps the private key; the public key is published.

Data is encrypted by using the recipientÆs public key, which can only be decrypted by the recipientÆs private key. RSA is very computation intensive, thus it is often used to create a digital envelope, which holds an RSA-encrypted DES key and DES-encrypted data. This method encrypts the secret DES key so that it can be transmitted over the network, but encrypts and decrypts the actual message using the much faster DES algorithm.