Fwd: The unsung genius who secured Britain's computer defences

Friday 11 Mar 2016

The unsung genius who secured Britain's computer defences
and paved the way for safe online shopping
------------------------------------------

The story behind the work of James Ellis, one of Britain=92s great unsung
heroes, and his role in strengthening the country=92s national security
can today be revealed in full for the first time

By Patrick Sawer

To his neighbours James Ellis seemed a man of unremarkable anonymity,
leaving his home in Cheltenham=92s leafy Leckhampton Hill each morning in
the timeworn manner of countless office workers.

=93None of our friends or neighbours had any idea what he did,=94 says hi=
s
widow Brenda. =93To be honest, I had no idea what he did until years afte=
r=20
his death.=94

In fact Ellis was one of Britain=92s great unsung heroes - a latter-day
Alan Turing, whose work led to ground-breaking techniques for keeping
our country safe from today=92s threat of devastating digital attacks.

But although his pioneering work as a brilliant cryptographer and
mathematician at GCHQ, the Government=92s secret listening centre, paved
the way for some of the methods used to tackle cyber terrorism and crime=20
today, his role has been largely forgotten.

Now his former bosses in the usually ultra-secretive world of GCHQ have
published a number of documents written by Ellis in 1970, to demonstrate
the key role he played - not just in the UK and USA=92s national security=
,=20
but, eventually, in the online security used by ordinary individuals on=20
a daily basis, from the sending of confidential documents to internet=20
shopping.

The achievements of Ellis =96 who was previously little known outside the
closed world of cryptography and the security and surveillance agencies
- have also been hailed in a speech by the director of GCHQ Robert
Hannigan to an American audience at the prestigious MIT university, in
Cambridge, Massachusetts.....


.... In 1969 Ellis arrived at a solution of deceptive simplicity. In the
words of science writer Simon Singh, he =93turned the problem on its
head=94, by suggesting the receiver of the message, and not the sender,
should play the central role in encryption.

Now known as Public-Key Cryptography (PKC or PKI), it is one of the
greatest breakthroughs in modern encryption and code breaking, but for
decades it was classified as top-secret, preventing the trio from
publicising their revolutionary breakthrough.....


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http://jya.com/ellisdoc.htm

http://www.cesg.gov.uk/about/nsecret.htm

http://cryptome.org/ukpk-true.htm

https://cryptome.org/ukpk-alt.htm