The Story Behind RSA: The Invention That Secured the Internet (ft. Turing Award Winner Ron Rivest)
Source: YouTube · a16z crypto · published Jul 23, 2026 · 54:37
Ron Rivest's foundational inventions of RSA and the MD hash function family established the core cryptographic primitives—digital signatures and collision-resistant hashing—that now secure all modern digital communications and blockchain networks 0:56.
Key Takeaways:
• Digital signatures and cryptographic hash functions are the two foundational primitives for blockchain protocols, with RSA being the first digital signature scheme ever created 2:27
• Rivest designed the MD family of collision-resistant hash functions (MD2, MD4, MD5, MD6) to make RSA signatures work practically—MD3 was canned for being insecure 6:00
• The NSA pushed DSA over RSA as a federal standard specifically because RSA could also be used for encryption, which threatened intelligence agencies' eavesdropping capabilities 29:00
• Rivest wishes quantum computing engineers "the worst of luck" since their main proven application would be breaking RSA, though he acknowledges the world must prepare with post-quantum cryptography 43:00
• The "cryptographer's nightmare" is waking up to find P=NP, which would make complexity-based cryptography fundamentally impossible, leaving only information-theoretic methods like the one-time pad 44:24
Rivest's work exemplifies how pure mathematics pursued for intellectual curiosity—like number theory—can become the bedrock of modern digital infrastructure.
Sources:
- 0:56 Introduction of Ron Rivest and the RSA cryptosystem
- 2:27 Digital signatures and hash functions as blockchain foundations
- [6:00](https://www.youtube.com/
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People started to realize that standards were essential that cryptography was about communication. Communication required standards. RSA was the natural candidate for standard. But RSA had the defect in in some eyes that it could also be used for encryption. The idea that was proposed was the DSA standard which could only be used for signatures. To me, signatures were probably of more interest. One of the big contributions of the Diffy Helman paper was the idea that you can sign things. You can authenticate messages as well. >> Suppose we wait a thousand years. Are we going to have a quantum computer that can break RSA or do you think it's just not possible period? >> People think that quantum computing is going to replace your laptop and do everything faster and so on too and it's not. Th…