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Topic: Clifford Cocks

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	Clifford Cocks - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Clifford Christopher Cocks is a British mathematician and cryptographer at GCHQ 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.
		Cocks was intrigued, thought about it overnight, and invented, in 1973, what has become known as the RSA encryption algorithm, realising Ellis' idea.
		The Cocks IBE scheme is not widely used in practice due to its high degree of ciphertext expansion.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Clifford_Cocks (379 words)

	Clifford Cocks (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-07)
		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.
		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.
	publicliterature.org /en/wikipedia/c/cl/clifford_cocks.html (220 words)

	Wired 7.04: The Open Secret
		Cocks then figured out a simple mathematical formula that would allow the sender to encrypt a message in such a way that it could be decrypted only by someone who knows the original primes.
		Cocks, in one evening, had achieved a breakthrough that several years later would be repeated - in the form of the revolutionary RSA algorithm - after months of intensive trial and error by MIT researchers Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Len Adleman.
		Cocks says that when Ellis read Diffie and Hellman's first paper, which outlined the public key idea but suggested no implementation, he said simply, "They're where I was in 1969." The Stanford team's second paper did suggest a means of implementation - identical to the Williamson solution.
	www.wired.com /wired/archive/7.04/crypto_pr.html (4588 words)

	The Alternative History of Public-Key Cryptography
		Clifford Cocks had recently graduated from Cambridge University, where he had specialised in number theory, one of the purest forms of mathematics.
		Cocks was quite diffident and very much still a rookie, whereas Patterson fully appreciated the context of the problem and was more capable of addressing the technical questions that would inevitably arise.
		When Diffie told Hellman about Ellis, Cocks and Williamson, his attitude was that the discoveries of the academics should be a footnote in the history of classified research, and that the discoveries at GCHQ should be a footnote in the history of academic research.
	cryptome.sabotage.org /ukpk-alt.htm (4132 words)

	ID-based cryptography - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Another approach to identity-based encryption was proposed by Clifford Cocks in 2001.
		The Cocks IBE scheme is based on well-studied assumptions (the quadratic residuosity assumption) but encrypts messages one bit at a time with a high degree of ciphertext expansion.
		Clifford Cocks, An Identity Based Encryption Scheme Based on Quadratic Residues, Proceedings of the 8th IMA International Conference on Cryptography and Coding, 2001.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Identity_based_encryption (634 words)

	Cocks (surname) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Richard Cocks, English trader in Japan in the seventeenth century
		Arthur Percy Somers Cocks, 7th Baron Somers (1864-1953)
		John Patrick Somers Cocks, 8th Baron Somers (1907-1995)
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Cocks (111 words)

	Informat.io on Rsa
		Clifford Cocks, a British mathematician working for the UK intelligence agency GCHQ, described an equivalent system in an internal document in 1973, but given the relatively expensive computers needed to implement it at the time, it was mostly considered a curiosity and, as far as is publicly known, was never deployed.
		His discovery, however, was not revealed until 1997 due to its top-secret classification, and Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman appear to have devised RSA independently of Cocks' work.
		Had Cocks' work been publicly known, a patent in the US would not have been possible either.
	www.informat.io /?title=RSA (3008 words)

	Unsung Heroes
		Together, Ellis, Cocks and Wiliamson had made the greatest breakthrough in twentieth century cryptography, but they could tell nobody about they had done.
		The American cryptographers have been credited with the discovery that has shaped the digital revolution, and indeed they deserve to be praised, but the tragedy has been that the British cryptographers have been ignored because their research was conducted behind the closed doors of GCHQ.
		Clifford Cocks was planning to attend a conference later in the year, on 18 December, and he was given the honour to making the announcement.
	www.simonsingh.com /Unsung_Heroes.html (1734 words)

	[10.0] Digital Ciphers & Public-Key Cryptography
		Then, in 1973, Clifford Cocks, who had just graduated from Cambridge with a degree in mathematics, joined GCHQ, and was told about Ellis's "wacky" idea.
		He was a boyhood friend of Cocks, and when Cocks told Williamson about his public-key cryptography scheme, Williamson was dubious and tried to think of ways to poke holes in it.
		Cocks finally got authorization to deliver a lecture on the GCHQ work in December 1997, a month after the death of Ellis.
	www.vectorsite.net /ttcode_10.html (6555 words)

	Reeling: the Movie Review Show's review of De-Lovely
		Director Irwin Winkler ("Life as a House") and screenwriter Jay Cocks ("Gangs of New York") use director/choreographer Bob Fosse's "All That Jazz" as a template for their musical biography/love story with less charged results.
		Watching his life unfold via a series of musical numbers staged by fictitious producer Gabe (Jonathan Pryce, "Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl"), the 73-year old Porter (Kevin Kline in age makeup), protests that Gabe is playing with his life.
		Rather than seeing the life of a complex, talented man, we get a series of elegant episodes that showcase costumes and set but leave the actors to be stick figures.
	www.reelingreviews.com /de-lovely.htm (1334 words)

	BBC - h2g2 - Asymmetric Ciphers
		All these were somewhat unsatisfactory, but one man did have a scheme that would work, it worked using some very complex mathematics, and it was elegant.
		Cocks was fascinated by the problem and he found a way to solve it using modular arithmetic and huge prime numbers, fairly advanced concepts in mathematics.
		In 1973 he announced to his superiors that he had the solution and yet there was no rejoicing from the cryptographers around the world.
	www.bbc.co.uk /dna/h2g2/A612280 (662 words)

	GENUKI: Irnham, LIN
		The CLIFFORDs and all the previous owners of Irnham were Catholics.
		In Irnham Hall was an ivory crucifix, said to be the same one held by Mary, Queen of Scots, at her execution.
		In 1841, the Honourable Charles Thomas CLIFFORD was lord of the Manor and principal landowner.
	www.genuki.org.uk /big/eng/LIN/Irnham (845 words)

	Pioneering Public Key: Public Exchange of Secret Keys > Separate Encryption and Decryption Keys (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-07)
		The solution came to a novice cryptographer, Clifford Cocks, just six weeks after he joined GCHQ in 1973.
		According to cryptographic historian Simon Singh in The Code Book, Cocks claimed that it took him half an hour to solve the mathematical puzzle with prime numbers and factoring, the same solution that has become known as RSA (after Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman).
		At the time Cocks solved the problem, he had no idea that GCHQ had been working on its solution for years or that he'd discovered one of the most important cryptographic methods ever conceived.
	www.informit.com /articles/article.asp?p=21409&seqNum=5 (864 words)

	GCHQ y el origen de la criptografía pública \| Kriptópolis
		Es en 1973 cuando entra en juego el matemático Clifford Cocks, experto en teoría de números, cuando se plantea la posibilidad de utilizar números primos y la factorización como base del sistema (llegan a la misma conclusión que a la que llegarían en 1977 Rivest, Shamir y Adleman con la invención del algoritmo RSA).
		En 1974, Clifford Cocks comenta sus avances a Malcom Williamsom (que acababa de incorporarse al GCHQ como criptógrafo).
		Conclusión, en 1975 James Ellis, Clifford Cocks y Malcolm Williamson habían descubierto todos los aspectos fundamentales de la criptografía de clave pública, pero tenían que permanecer en silencio.
	www.kriptopolis.org /node/426 (743 words)

	The Code Book
		Another important point raised by Singh is the classification of knowledge by the government agencies as impedance to progress.
		Singh gives the examples of Jame Ellis and Clifford Cocks, who made significant contributions to the concept and implementation of the public key concept years earlier than the team at MIT (Rivest, Shamir, Adlemen).
		Because their work was considered Top Secret by the British government, it didn't see the light of today until...actually some of it is still held in the dark.
	www.unc.edu /~kome/inls187/bookReview.html (589 words)

	Cryptography-Digest Digest #272 (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-07)
		In the classified universe, Clifford Cocks and company discovered non-secret encryption first and Diffie and Hellman are just a footnote.
		In the unclassified universe, Diffie and Hellman are the true progenitors (and Merkle, RSA, etc. are their prophets) and Cocks simply merits a footnote.
		In the classified universe, Clifford Cocks and > company discovered non-secret encryption first and Diffie and > Hellman are just a footnote.
	www.mail-archive.com /cryptography-digest@senator-bedfellow.mit.edu/msg03473.html (2768 words)

	Crypto-Gram: May 15, 1998
		Fast forward to 1960 in the U.K. Intrigued by this idea, James Ellis wrote a classified paper providing an existence proof of "non-secret encryption." It's a thoroughly impractical scheme, with large tables and other pre-computer cryptographic ideas, but there it was.
		In 1973 Clifford Cocks (another British spook) published a classified paper where he described (essentially) RSA.
		This announcement by GCHQ doesn't mean that we're going to start calling RSA "Cocks" and Diffie-Hellman "Williamson," but it is an interesting footnote to the history of modern cryptography.
	www.schneier.com /crypto-gram-9805.html (1111 words)

	Simon Singh on The Paula Gordon Show
		Virtually simultaneously, in Britain, James Ellis, Clifford Cocks and Malcolm Williamson also figured out how to do public key encryption.
		But as employees of Government Communications Headquarters (formed from the remnants of the famed top-secret WW2 Blenchley Park,) their work was...
		Singh tells the story of the simultaneous (secret) development of mathematical padlocks in Britain, citing the work of James Ellis, Clifford Cocks and Malcolm Williamson.
	www.paulagordon.com /shows/singh (936 words)

	Wired 7.07: Rants & Raves
		Nevertheless, I thought some of Clifford Cocks' claims were off the mark datewise.
		It is also true that Cocks seemed saddened by his belief that others had profited from work that Ellis had pioneered without credit or remuneration.
		Setting aside the debate about prior discovery entirely, it would probably have surprised Cocks to know how very little remuneration accrued directly to Whitfield Diffie (my husband) and Martin Hellman as a result of their discovery - although they have done rather well indirectly.
	www.wired.com /wired/archive/7.07/rants.html (1283 words)

	AKL Services Page (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-07)
		RSA is named after its inventors, Rivest, Shamir and Adelman (though some say Clifford Cocks had formulated the algorithm some years before Rivest and company went public with it).
		RSA is the only example of an asymmetric algorithm that has achieved wide-spread use.
		Thus it is possible to create digital signatures and thereby achieve non-repudiation (the sender of a digitally signed document cannot deny that he signed it because only he has access to the private key).
	www.privacycrypt.com /services.htm (200 words)

	Computer Security
		Another GCHQ employee, Clifford Cocks, discovered the solution - the same mathematical function as in RSA - in 1973.
		The Cocks discovery was not made public until 18 December 1997, when he presented a paper at a conference.
		They are, however, acknowledged in RSA Security's Official Guide to Cryptography and the fourth edition of the Encyclopedia of Computer Science.
	www.melbpc.org.au /pcupdate/2207/2207article15.htm (1015 words)

	History of Cryptography
		Various classified papers were written at GCHQ during the 1960s and 1970s which eventually led to schemes essentially identical to RSA encryption and to Diffie-Hellman key exchange in 1973 and 1974.
		Some of these have now been published, and the inventors (James Ellis, Clifford Cocks, and Malcolm Williamson) have made public (some of) their work.
		This in turn broke the near monopoly on cryptography held by government organizations worldwide (see S Levy's Crypto for a journalistic account of the policy controversy in the US).
	www.codesandciphers.org.uk /heritage/ModSec.htm (1922 words)

	CNN.com In-Depth Specials - Inside the NSA
		However, in 1997, the British government released a document showing that three employees of its eavesdropping organization known as the Government Communications Headquarters discovered a similar approach earlier in the 1970s.
		British officials said the discovery by researchers James Ellis, Clifford Cocks and Malcolm Williamson was kept secret for national security reasons.
		In 1991, programmer Phil Zimmermann released the first version of his encryption program, Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), as a free program.
	edition.cnn.com /SPECIALS/2001/nsa/stories/crypto.history (1278 words)

	Prehistory of Public Key Cryptography
		Briefly, James Ellis came up with the idea in 1970, and proved that it was theoretically possible.
		In 1973, Clifford Cocks invented a variant on RSA; a few months later, Malcom Williamson invented a Diffie-Hellman analog.
		Their inspiration, apparently, was a World War II-era paper by an unknown person at Bell Labs.
	www.cs.columbia.edu /~smb/nsam-160/index.html (816 words)

	RSA
		Given the relatively expensive computers needed to implement it at the time it was mostly considered a curiosity and, as far as is publicly known, was never deployed.
		Since the algorithm had been published prior to patent application, regulations in much of the rest of the world precluded patents elsewhere.
		Suppose a user Alice wishes to allow Bob to send her a private message over an insecure transmission medium.
	www.paleorama.com /Eponyms-R/RSA.php (3038 words)

	::CryptoGraphy - University of Rhode Island ::
		In 1997, the British Government Communication Headquarters (GCHQ) announced that they had developed a public key cryptosystem by 1973.
		Three people James Ellis, Clifford Cocks and Malcolm Williamson were involved in developing the system.
		James Ellis was credit with developing the concept of asymmetric key system, Clifford Cocks independently invented the RSA algorithm and Malcolm Williamson developed the key agreement protocol which is know as Diffe- Hellman- Merkle key exchange protocol.
	homepage.cs.uri.edu /research/cryptography/publickey.htm (477 words)

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