A system of public key cryptography, named for its inventors: Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman. The RSA algorithm takes two large prime numbers, finds their product, and then derives asymmetric keys from the prime numbers and their product. Because the public key includes the product, the private key could be derived from the public key if the product could be factored. No easy method for factoring products of large prime numbers is currently known, but it has not been mathematically proven that no such method is possible. Therefore, the discovery of a fast way to factor such numbers, or the development of quantum computers, would break RSA.