So who invented public-key encryption?
In memory of James Ellis, RIP.
Published in
5 min readMay 3, 2019
We all know about the work of Alan Turing, but I’d like to outline three other greats in cipher cracking 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…