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The Diffie-Hellman key exchange has drawbacks. As discussed in Section 3.1.3, it is susceptible to the man in the middle attack. This section is about the RSA public-key cryptosystem of Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman [#!rsa:origin!#], which is an alternative to Diffie-Hellman that is more flexible in some ways.
We first describe the RSA cryptosystem, then discuss several ways to attack it. It is important to be aware of such weaknesses, in order to avoid foolish mistakes when implementing RSA. We barely scratched the surface here of the many possible attacks on specific implementations of RSA or other cryptosystems.