Криптограф Клиффорд Кокс және ашылу тарихы

British cryptographer
the Australian rules footballer

Clifford Christopher Cocks (born 28 December 1950) is a British mathematician and cryptographer. In the early 1970s, while working at the United Kingdom Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), he developed an early public key cryptography (PKC) system. This pre dated commercial offerings, but due to the classified nature of Cocks' work, it did not become widely known until 1997 when the work was declassified. As his work was not available for public review until 1997, it had no impact on numerous commercial initiatives relating to Internet security that had been commercially developed and that were well established by 1997. His work was technically aligned with the Diffie–Hellman key exchange and elements of the RSA algorithm, these well known systems were independently developed and commercialized.

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 PhD student at the University of Oxford, where he specialised in number theory under Bryan Birch, but left academia without finishing his doctorate.

In 1987, the GCHQ had plans to release the work, but Peter Wright's Spycatcher MI5 memoir caused them to delay revealing the research by ten years. 24 years after its discovery, on 18 December 1997, Cocks revealed the GCHQ history of public key research in a public talk. James Ellis had died on 25 November 1997, a month before the public announcement was made.

In 2001, Cocks developed one of the first secure identity based encryption (IBE) schemes, based on assumptions about quadratic residues in composite groups. The Cocks IBE scheme is not widely used in practice due to its high degree of ciphertext expansion. However, it is currently one of the few IBE schemes which do not use bilinear pairings, and rely for security on more well studied mathematical problems.

In 1968, Cocks won a silver medal at the 10th International Mathematical Olympiad. Cocks held the post of Chief Mathematician at GCHQ. He established the Heilbronn Institute for Mathematical Research at the University of Bristol. Cocks was made a Companion of the Order of the Bath in 2008 (the citation describes him as "Counsellor, Foreign and Commonwealth Office"). He was awarded an honorary degree from the University of Bristol in 2008, and an honorary Doctor of Science from the University of Birmingham in 2015. With James Ellis and Malcolm Williamson, Cocks was honoured for his part in the development of public key cryptography by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 2010 and by induction into the Cryptologic Hall of Honor in 2021. Cocks was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2015. His certificate of election reads: