The Roots of Cybersecurity Owe A Great Deal to James Ellis, Clifford Cocks and Malcolm Williamson

In memory of James Ellis, RIP.

We all know about the work of Alan Turing, but I’d like to outline three of the greats in cryptography who, at the time, did not receive the praise they deserved: James Ellis, Clifford Cocks and Malcolm Williamson. Each of them worked at GCHQ, and where Clifford Cocks discovered public key encryption, independently from Ron Rivest, in 1973, and Malcolm Williamson discovered the key exchange method used by the Diffie-Hellman method several years before Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman published their classic paper [here]:

The eventual declassification of their work was in 1997 and to honour them, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), in 2010, awarded them the 100th IEEE Milestone Award for their contributions to cryptography. To show the significance of the award, other winners included contributions to the first transatlantic telephone cable and the first transatlantic satellite TV communication.