Clifford Cocks

Clifford Cocks

Clifford Christopher Cocks, CB, (born 28 December 1950 ) is a British mathematician and cryptographer at Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). He 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. He has not been generally recognised for this achievement because his work was by definition classified information, and therefore not released to the public at the time.