Clifford Cocks

Clifford Christopher Cocks, CB, ( born December 28, 1950) is a British mathematician and crypto Videographer at GCHQ, the widespread encryption algorithm, which is now known as RSA, invented; and about three years before it was independently developed by Ronald Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman at MIT. This achievement is it not generally accepted as his work was, by definition of classified subject and therefore was not published at that time.

Life

In 1968, Cocks won the silver medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad during his time at Manchester Grammar School. He then studied mathematics at King 's College, Cambridge and graduated from Oxford University, where he specialized in number theory. In September 1973, he left the university and joined the CESG, a branch of GCHQ, at.

At GCHQ Cocks learned from the model developed by James H. Ellis in the late 1960s concept of "non- secret encryption ". Cocks developed in 1973 as the first implementation of this concept, a method, which became known as RSA encryption later. The GCHQ did not have any use for the procedure, but it classified as a secret. It became known only after its rediscovery and publication by Ronald L. Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman in 1977. Cocks ' earlier authorship was only in 1997 apparently.

2001 Cocks developed one of the first secure ID-based encryption schemes (IBE ), starting from assumptions about quadratic residues in composite groups. The Cocks IBE scheme is not widely used due to its high degree of ciphertext expansion (increase in length of the encrypted message ) in practice. It is currently one of the few IBE schemes, which no bilinear pairings used and relies for security on several well-studied mathematical problems.

In 2003, Clifford Cocks Chief Actuary of GCHQ. In 2008 he was appointed Companion of the Order of the Bath appointed (the source describes him as " Counsellor, Foreign and Commonwealth Office " ), and received an honorary degree from the University of Bristol.

Comments

Writings

• Clifford Cocks, An Identity Based Encryption Scheme Based on Quadratic Residues. , Cryptography and Coding, 8th IMA International Conference, 2001, pp. 360-363.
• Clifford Cocks Mathematics and Cryptography in Timothy Gowers June Barrow- Green, Imre Leader ( Editor): The Princeton Companion to Mathematics, Princeton University Press 2008