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In April 1977, Rivest, Shamir and Adleman spent Passover at the house of a student, and had consumed significant amounts of Manischewitz wine before returning to their respective homes some time around midnight. Rivest, unable to sleep, lay on his couch reading a mathematics textbook. He began mulling over the question that had been puzzling him for weeks—is it possible to build an asymmetric cipher? Is it possible to find a one-way function that can be reversed only if the receiver has some special information? Suddenly, the mists began to clear and he had a revelation. He spent the rest of that night formalizing his idea, effectively writing a complete scientific paper before daybreak. Rivest had made a breakthrough, but it had grown out of a yearlong collaboration with Shamir and Adleman, and it would not have been possible without them. Rivest finished off the paper by listing the authors alphabetically; Adleman, Rivest, Shamir. The next morning, Rivest handed the paper to Adleman, who went through his usual process of trying to tear it apart, but this time he could find no faults. His only criticism was with the list of authors. “I told Ron to take my name off the paper,” recalls Adleman. “I told him that it was his invention, not mine. But Ron refused and we got into a discussion about it. We agreed that I would go home and contemplate it for one night, and consider what I wanted to do. I went back the next day and suggested to Ron that I be the third author. I recall thinking that this paper would be the least interesting paper that I will ever be on.” Adleman could not have been more wrong. The system, dubbed RSA (Rivest, Shamir, Adleman) as opposed to ARS, went on to become the most influential cipher in modern cryptography.
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Simon Singh (The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography)