Clifford Cocks
| Clifford Cocks | |
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Clifford Cocks at the Royal Society admissions day in London, July 2015
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| Born | Clifford Christopher Cocks 28 December 1950 Prestbury, Cheshire, United Kingdom |
| Nationality | British |
| Fields | Cryptography |
| Institutions | |
| Alma mater | University of Cambridge (BA) |
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Clifford Christopher Cocks CB FRS (born 28 December 1950) is a British mathematician and cryptographer. In 1973 he invented a public key cryptography algorithm now known as the RSA algorithm, while working at the United Kingdom Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ).
The idea was classified information and his insight remained hidden for 24 years, despite being independently invented by Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman in 1977. Public Key Cryptography using prime factorization is now part of nearly every internet transaction.
Cocks was educated at Manchester Grammar School and went on to study the Mathematical Tripos as an undergraduate at King's College, Cambridge. He continued as a postgraduate student at the University of Oxford, where he specialised in number theory.
Cocks left Oxford to join Communications-Electronics Security Group (CESG), an arm of GCHQ, in September 1973. Soon after, Cocks was told about James H. Ellis' non-secret encryption, an idea which had been published in 1969 but never successfully implemented. Several people had attempted creating the required one-way functions, but Cocks, with his background in number-theory, decided to use prime factorization, and didn't even write it down at the time.
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