What is RSA primarily known for?

RSA is primarily recognized as an asymmetric encryption algorithm that relies on the mathematical properties of prime numbers. Its security is grounded in the difficulty of factoring large integers, specifically the product of two large prime numbers. In RSA, two keys are generated: one public key that can be shared openly for encrypting messages, and one private key that is kept secret and is used for decrypting those messages. This asymmetric approach allows for secure communication without needing to share a private key with the recipient.

While the other options refer to different cryptographic concepts, they do not accurately describe RSA. A symmetric encryption method, for example, uses the same key for both encryption and decryption, which is fundamentally different from the asymmetric nature of RSA. A hashing technique focuses on generating a fixed-size hash value from input data and is primarily used for integrity verification rather than encryption. Lastly, a data compression algorithm is designed to reduce the size of data for storage or transmission, which is unrelated to the encryption functions that RSA serves.