The patent would have expired on Septem(the term of patent was 17 years at the time), but the algorithm was released to the public domain by RSA Security on 6 September 2000, two weeks earlier. MIT was granted Template:US patent for a 'Cryptographic communications system and method' that used the algorithm in 1983. The RSA algorithm was publicly described in 1978 by Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman at MIT the letters RSA are the initials of their surnames, listed in the same order as on the paper. His discovery, however, was not revealed until 1998 due to its top-secret classification, and Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman devised RSA independently of Cocks' work.Īdi Shamir, one of the authors of RSA: Rivest, Shamir and Adleman
