James Ellis was forerunner of Cocks' PKC in 1970,
"conceived of the possibility of "non-secret
encryption", more commonly termed
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-key_cryptography>public-key
cryptography."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_H._Ellis
Diffie-Hellman is sometimes suggested to have
been aided by NSA whispered nudging of GCHQ
classified efforts. Diffie denies this. To be
sure, crypto leaking strengths and vulns is
inherent in crypto wars. Not many know of
Diffie's TEMPEST hair which bypasses NSA's TSCM during visits.
At 05:04 PM 12/19/2018, you wrote:
On Saturday, December 15, 2018, 11:10:46 PM PST,
grarpamp <[email protected]> wrote:
<https://www.wired.com/1993/02/crypto-rebels/>https://www.wired.com/1993/02/crypto-rebels/
Author: Steven Levy
security 02.01.93 12:00 pm
Crypto Rebels
It's the FBIs, NSAs, and Equifaxes of the world versus a swelling
movement of Cypherpunks, civil libertarians, and millionaire hackers.
[snip]
>By 1977, three members of this new community created a set of
algorithms that implemented the Diffie-Hellman scheme. Called RSA for
its foundersMIT scientiists Rivest, Shamir, and Adlemanit offered
encryption that was likely to be stronger than the Data Encryption
Standard (DES), a government-approved alternative that does not use
public keys. The actual strength of key-based cryptographic systems
rests largely in the size of the keyâin other words, how many bits of
information make up the key. The larger the key, the harder it is to
break the code. While DES, which was devised at IBM's research lab,
limits key size to 56 bits, RSA keys could be any size. (The trade-off
was that bigger keys are unwieldy, and RSA runs much more slowly than
DES.) But DES had an added burden: Rumors abounded that the NSA had
forced IBM to intentionally weaken the system so that the government
could break DES-encoded messages. RSA did not have that stigma. (The
NSA has denied these rumors.)
We have since learned that what became the RSA
system started out by being invented by British
GCHQ employee Clifford
Cocks.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Cocks>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Cocks
"Clifford Christopher Cocks
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_the_Bath>CB
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fellow_of_the_Royal_Society>FRS
(born 28 December 1950) is a British
mathematician and
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptographer>cryptographer.
In 1973, while working at the United Kingdom
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Communications_Headquarters>Government
Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), he invented
a
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_key_cryptography>public
key cryptography algorithm equivalent to what
would become (in 1978) the
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_(algorithm)>RSA algorithm.
The idea was
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classified_information>classified
information and his insight remained hidden for
24 years, despite being independently invented
by
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Rivest>Rivest,
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adi_Shamir>Shamir,
and
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Adleman>Adleman
in
1977.<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Cocks#cite_note-4>[4]<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Cocks#cite_note-5>[5]
Public-key cryptography using
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_factorisation>prime
factorisation is now part of nearly every
Internet
transaction.<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Cocks#cite_note-6>[6]<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Cocks#cite_note-7>[7]
Ã
[end of quote from Wikipedia.]
I, Jim Bell, had my "Forrest Gump" moment, I
believe during the first days of February
1977. Very soon after my return to the MIT
campus, I was walking through the hallways of
Building 2, the Mathematics Department. Posted,
behind glass, were what I now believe was a
statement of the RSA system. I think they had
posted it in order to irrevocably make it no longer secret.
I suppose if I wanted to pump up my credentials,
I could say that I immediately recognized the
importance of this revelation. Unfortunately,
my reaction (if put into text) was far closer to "Huh???".
Jim Bell
