Clifford Cocks, English mathematician and cryptographer

Clifford Christopher Cocks is a British mathematician and cryptographer. In the early 1970s, while working at the United Kingdom Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), he developed an early public-key cryptography (PKC) system. This pre-dated commercial offerings, but due to the classified nature of Cocks' work, it did not become widely known until 1997 when the work was declassified.