Slashdot Mirror
The Encryption Pioneer Who Was Written Out of History
nk497 writes "Clifford Cocks is one of three British men who developed an encryption system while working for the UK government in the early 1970s, but was forced to keep the innovation quiet for national security reasons. Just a few years later, their Public Encryption Key was developed separately by US researchers at Stanford and MIT, and eventually evolved into the RSA encryption algorithm, which now secures billions of transactions on the internet every day. 'The first I knew about [the US discovery] was when I read about it in Scientific American. I opened it one lunchtime and saw a description and thought, "Ah, that's what we did,"' he said. 'You don't go into the business to get external credit and recognition — quite the opposite. Quite honestly, the main reaction was one of complete surprise that this had actually been discovered outside.' The UK trio have now won recognition for their accomplishment in the form of the Milestone Award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers."
If you sign an NDA, don't complain about lack of recognition...
The Brits are pretty amazing. It's like they are a step ahead of everyone in this field. I imagine not brushing your teeth gives you a few minutes extra every day, and that adds up.
I'm kidding of course. But the British, maybe because of brains, maybe because of necessity, have been pushing the boundaries of computation for almost two hundred years. We owe a great debt of gratitude towards them.
But they were also kind of dicks about that whole independence thing. So it all evens out.
Maybe they didn't want to admit that cocks had been working out well for them, after all.
This story is an amazing coincidence. I discovered relativity before Einstein, but I never published my findings. Do you agree recognition is long overdue?
Maybe he should have protected his work. Perhaps with some kind of ... encryption?
So that's what Al Gore meant when he said he discovered the intertubes...
It's really not a milestone for anything if nobody can build on your results. It's certainly a great achievement to come up with an approach like that. However it contributes nothing to science if you don't publish it - the contribution was made by others. They weren't written out of history - they opted out.
There were two reasons for not going ahead with patents: one was the view that it should stay classified, because it was for our own use. The other was the advice we got that this is mathematics and couldn’t be patented even if we wanted to. The rules in the US are different, which is why it was possible for it to be patented eventually in the US.
I thought even US law said that purely mathematical algorithms couldn't be patented? Can anyone shed light on why this was patentable (or is this another example of the USPTO letting through something they shouldn't?)
I'd tell a UDP joke, but you may not get it. I'd tell a TCP joke, but I'd have to keep repeating it until you got it.
A pioneer is someone who blazes a trail that others follow. If the trail is hidden, and no one is able or willing to follow, then there is no pioneer. At that point he is just a guy hiding in a jungle.
The British team may have been first to discover something, but that is not what it means to be a pioneer. Ultimately, they contributed nothing to the field of encryption since their work was superseded by the time it became public.
It was kept a secret so it couldn't benefit humanity (and public key encryption has been an enormous benefit). I don't really care if it was their job, I have really very little time for the silly secrecy around the "security" services anyway. Most of what they do is policework, and the police aren't a state secret above the law.
Rich.
libguestfs - tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images
So. Patenting. Obviousness.
All those going on about how RSA is patentable even though software because it was so innovative. Well if someone else had invented it too, it can't have been all that unobvious. It was an idea whose time had come and patent or not, it would be available.
One software patent we now KNOW didn't need a patent and shouldn't get one.
Moe: Phone call for C. Cocks. C Cocks? Anyone?
The History repeats, Columbus announce his discover. The US Researchers published their work. But someone was there before.
Who is "The Discoverer"?
Dude does groundbreaking work, work gets suppressed by British government for reasons of national security, dude gets screwed.
At least this guy didn't then get force-fed oestrogen by the government until he killed himself, which is something I suppose.
GCHQ was ready to talk of this issue and had all the press like 'kits' ready for a nice PR peek in 1984.
Then came the Peter Writes's Spycatcher book.
Thatcher was destroying any trace of union activity within the GCHQ at the time to, so the PKE release was dropped until 1997.
In the 1970's the NSA and GCHQ did not know what to do with it.
With "no" internet, one idea floated was nuke go codes.
The more interesting issue was the 1985 quadripartite (UK, US, German, French) to keep DES open to the NSA/GCHQ but safe from commercial rivals/hackers.
PKE was fought later with Clipper, key recovery, key escrow.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
http://www.rsa.com/rsalabs/node.asp?id=2227
Here RSA mentions that because brits don't go to the dentist DES is dead.
If only we could factor large prime numbers as Bill Gates suggested.
"Dick" is a common british name, so his parents could have called him Dick Cock
It's a good thing the Official Secrets Act prevented this from being news at the time. I'm not sure reporters could have kept a straight face reporting on the "Cocks Algorithm."
Most of them are arts graduates with about as much scientific and technical knowledge as a comatose slug. Nothing has changed. They wouldn't know technical innovation if it kicked them in the balls. While this country his still run by people who think quoting shakespeare parrot fashion is the last word in intellect then we stand no chance.
This story is an amazing coincidence. I discovered relativity before Einstein, but I never published my findings. Do you agree recognition is long overdue?
I stole Einstein's research, applied it to building a time machine, then went back in time and discovered it before him. I _still_ didn't get recognition and worse still, his research now claims that time travel is impossible so I can't try it again.
I went back in time and posted before you, even made sure it was farther upthread than your post.
Home of The Suki Series
Just that every time the editor for their papers saw the list of names at the top with "C. Cocks" in it they always thought it was a childish prank and erased his name.
To this day every time he gets pulled over the cops say "Come on buddy, your REAL ID this time".
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
Sounds like something every teenage boy need to hide their porn collection.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Why should anyone get recognition if they keep their discovery a secret?
Knuth's TAOCP, Volume 2, Third Edition, Page 407:
"Historical note: It was revealed in 1998 that Clifford Cocks had considered encoding messages by the transformation $x^{pq} mod pq$ already in 1973, but his work was kept secret".
And that feels like the correct amount of recognition.
According to the cryptography textbook I use and the article, this was made public in 1997. He is also mentioned in the textbook when detailing the development the RSA-algorithm, so I wouldn't say he's been written out of history. Introduction to Cryptography with Coding theory 2nd edition by Wade Trappe, Lawrence Washington
it leads to people acting on peer pressure. we try to discourage that sort of thing.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
Much of Cocks' work is documented in Simon Singh's fantastic treatise on cryptography and stenography through history, 'The Code Book'. This includes thoughts by Cocks' and James Ellis on the secrecy of their work, and their comfort at that -- they knew what they were getting into. Especially telling are Ellis' quotes -- as he died ~1 month before the public announcement was made...
... but he still relied on security through obscurity
That's what I'm hearing here....
...and also Cocks.
Hardly written out of history. As I recall he got a whole chapter in "The Code Book" . I would bet that most people familiar with RSA or Diffie Helman have read that.
so how many RSA patents are now invalidated?
that's what you get for workin' for the man, spook.
Genealogically humorous!
If you want reconigtion on crypto, keep yourself away from the military.
Cryptography is a long series of people reinventing schemes because A: they didn't know about them (the secrecy of the existence was maintained), and B: it was effective. A great example is the Jefferson disk (1795) and Bazeries Cylinder (US-Army M-94, 1923-1942), which were functionally identical.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson_disk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-94
So know you know that the Brits were 20 years ahead in computing and 20 years ahead in crypto-analysis do you think that 256AES is safe?
All your secrets are belong to UK.
you didn't know that?
oh shit, did i just reveal...
nevermind
(whistling)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
If this is true then some patents may prove invalid.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.