RSA vs DSA

When dealing with cryptography and encryption algorithms, there are two names that will appear in every once in a while. These are DSA and RSA. Both of these are encryption systems that are in common use when encrypting content. Both of them give good results and can be employed at will. However, if there is need of their specific abilities, some differences are noted. A thorough comparison of the two is discussed below.

The DSA commonly refers to the Digital Signature Algorithm. The RSA on the other hand refers to the initials of the people who created it. These are Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman. The DSA was designed as an encryption algorithm. The DSA was developed by the NSA to be used by the US government as a standard for digital signatures. This signature borrows heavily from the ElGamal Signature Algorithm from which most ideas were borrowed from. RSA, on the other hand, looks at the difficulty of factoring numbers as the main aspect of its development.

The name DSA spells out its main function. This is a program that is mainly built for signing, and therefore it is quite popular with digital signatures.  This however does not extend beyond the signature to the message itself. RSA, on the other hand, covers signing in encryption and encryption of the message contained as well.

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