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RSA is a type of cryptosystem—a method of encoding and decoding messages—used to send sensitive data and information over an insecure network such as the Internet. RSA was developed in the 1970s and named after its creators, Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman, computer scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The RSA system is an example of asymmetric cryptography, which uses a public key to encrypt data and a private key to decrypt data. RSA data keys are derived from factors based on two large prime numbers—numbers divisible only by 1 and itself—creating a solution considered too time-consuming to decode without the accompanying key. On the strength of its complexity and ability of both public and private keys to encrypt and decrypt data, RSA is one of the most widely used asymmetric cryptosystems in computer security.