RSA
RSA is an asymmetric algorithm and is attributed to three people but reading this article will explain who developed the algorithm years earlier. When reading this article, try to understand the section on key generation, encrypting messages, decrypting messages, and signing messages. Most importantly, note the speed of RSA in comparison to DES that was discussed in the section on symmetric key encryption. Also note how attacks such as man-in-the-middle and RSA blinding attacks can be avoided.
As with all ciphers, it is important how RSA public keys are distributed. Key distribution must be secured against a man-in-the-middle attack. Suppose Eve has some way to give Bob arbitrary keys and make him believe they belong to Alice. Suppose further that Eve can intercept transmissions between Alice and Bob. Eve sends Bob her own public key, which Bob believes to be Alice's. Eve can then intercept any ciphertext sent by Bob, decrypt it with her own secret key, keep a copy of the message, encrypt the message with Alice's public key, and send the new ciphertext to Alice. In principle, neither Alice nor Bob would be able to detect Eve's presence. Defenses against such attacks are often based on digital certificates or other components of a public key infrastructure.