The Alternative History of Public-Key Cryptography (1999)

It was Singh's book got me interested in crypto when I read it in 9th grade, but it really made me smile to revisit this!

Since leaving GCHQ, the NSA, and a hedge fund, Nick works as a genetic anthropologist at the Broad Institute. Last year I had the distinct pleasure of haranguing Nick Patterson with all manner of technical questions, mostly with regards to Hidden Markov Models. He never did mention his role in public-key cryptography. The NYTimes did a bio on him a few years back, it's a great read about an amazing person and intellectual giant.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/12/science/12prof.html http://www.broadinstitute.org/blog/five-questions-nick-patte...

I wrote about this in Wired some time ago. Here's the link. It's also the subject of the last part--a sort of epilog--to my book Crypto.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/7.04/crypto_pr.html

I was at Cocks' talk, which was held, appropriately enough, at Bletchley Park, where Alan Turing and others cracked Nazi Enigma codes. It is really worth a visit if you are in London and have a day to travel. Whit Diffie also shared with me some fascinating stories about his strange relationship with James Ellis, his counterpart in the classifed shadow world.

Clifford Cocks, meet David Huffman...

-- Exhibit A --

Cocks did not fully appreciate the significance of his discovery. He was unaware of the fact that GCHQ's brightest minds had been struggling with the problem for three years, and had no idea that he had made one of the most important cryptographic breakthroughs of the century. Cocks's naivety may have been part of the reason for his success, allowing him to attack the problem with confidence, rather than timidly prodding at it.

-- Exhibit B --

In 1951, David A. Huffman [...] hit upon the idea of using a frequency-sorted binary tree and quickly proved this method the most efficient. In doing so, the student outdid his professor, who had worked with information theory inventor Claude Shannon to develop a similar code.

--

In other words, as we can clearly see here, it pays to be ignorant :-)

I wonder if Clifford Cocks was the inspiration for the passage in Neal Stephenson's book Cryptonomicon, where the rookie NSA employee finds the (zeta?) function that is seeded with the word "COMSTOCK"? Either way, the real history of cryptography is often just as interesting as the fiction written about it.

That's the problem with government research - same problem with the air forces' 1968 moon landing.

this is gonna sound silly, but is anyone else scared to visit cryptome? same with wikileaks.