Ronald Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman publicly disclose RSA, an asymmetric encryption system. They did so through an article by Martin Gardner in Scientific American, titled “A new kind of cipher that would take millions of years to break.” The basic mechanism is based on the assumption that factoring a very large number into prime numbers is an intrinsically difficult and time-consuming operation. The contribution of Diffie-Hellman-Merkle, and then Rivest-Shamir-Adleman, is likely the greatest leap forward for cryptography in two thousand years. PS: Gardner also challenges his readers by proposing a public key for an encrypted cipher. The key is 114381625 7578888676 6923577997 6146612010 2182967212 4236256256 1842935706 9352457338 9783059712 3563958705 0589890751 4759929002 6879543541. It will resist the onslaught of mathematicians, computer scientists and engineers for a good 17 years. Then on April 26, 1994, a team of 600 volunteers announced the prime factors: RSA-129 = 3490529510847650949147849619903898133417764638493387843990820577 × 32769132993266709549961988190834461413177642967992942539798288533. The message could then be decoded, finally, in 1994. And it turned out to be: “The magic words are squeamish ossifrage.” The number of digits (bits, actually) commonly used for RSA codes has, however, increased significantly in the meantime, so much so that it required all the computing power (of silicon-based computers) on the planet for more than the age of the Universe to be broken down into prime factors.
