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RSA
When someone refers to an RSA certificate, what they’re talking about is an SSL certificate that uses the RSA algorithm for digital signatures and/or data encryption.
RSA (Rivest–Shamir–Adleman) is a cryptographic algorithm that encrypts and decrypts the data. Invented in the year 1978, RSA was named after Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman – the mathematicians who invented it.
The fundamental function of an RSA certificate is to use the RSA algorithm for data encryption. In simpler words, it turns the data into an undecipherable format so that no one can see what the original data was, let alone tamper with it. This way, it solves the significant problem of secure communication. Such secure communication, at the time of the invention of the RSA certificate, was needed primarily in the military. But today, it’s required everywhere because of the proliferation of the internet and ecommerce. RSA certificates are most widely used with the asymmetric encryption algorithm.