Today in 2000, RSA Security Inc. released their RSA algorithm for public-key cryptography into the public domain, a few days before their patent (US No. 4,405,829) was set to expire.
The relaxation of the U.S. government restrictions earlier in the year removed one of the last barriers to the world-wide distribution of cryptographic software systems.
The acronym "RSA" comes from the surnames of Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman, who publicly described the algorithm in 1977. Colleagues at MIT, they worked together for several months trying to find a practical implementation of the concept of an asymmetric public-private key cryptosystem.
For a time, they thought what they wanted to achieve was impossible due to contradictory requirements. In April 1977, they spent Passover at the house of a student and drank a good deal of wine before returning to their homes at around midnight. Rivest, unable to sleep, lay on the couch with a math textbook and started thinking about their one-way function, the key to overcoming the challenge of creating a workable solution. He spent the rest of the night formalizing his idea, and he had much of the paper ready by daybreak.
Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman received the 2002 Turing Award for “their ingenious contribution to making public-key cryptography useful in practice.”