Clifford Cocks

Clifford Cocks is a mathematician and cryptographer who invented the widely used encryption algorithm now commonly known as RSA, about three years before it was independently developed by Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman at MIT. He was and is still not generally recognized for this achievement because his work was not released to the public at the time.

While a recent mathematics graduate, graduate school drop out, aged 22, and a brand new employee at GCHQ, Cocks was told about James Ellis' existence proof for "non-secret encryption" and further that since it had been developed in the late 60's, no one had been able to find a way to actually implement the concept.

Cocks was intrigued, thought about it overnight, and invented what has become known as the RSA encryption algorithm, implementing Ellis' idea. GCHQ appears not to have been able to find a way to use the idea, and in any case, treated it as classified, so that when it was reinvented and published by Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman in 1976, Cocks' prior achievement remained unknown.

Clifford Cocks currently (2003) holds the post of Chief Mathematician at GCHQ.

External link

• [1] - Wired article on public key cryptography at GCHQ
• James Ellis' account of the invention of non-secret encryption
• Cock's internal GCHQ note on his discovery