Rivest–Shamir–Adleman (RSA)

RSA is a widely used encryption method that secures digital communication. It relies on two keys: a public key, which anyone can access to encrypt messages, and a private key, kept secret to decrypt them. RSA's security is based on the difficulty of factoring large prime numbers; while it's easy to multiply primes, reversing the process to find the original primes is extremely hard. This ensures that messages encrypted with the public key can only be deciphered by someone with the private key, enabling secure data exchange and digital signatures in everyday online transactions.