THe Encryption pioneers who were written out of histroy, to secure the British Government...

In the early 1970s, three men working for the British Government developed an encryption system that – almost 40 years later – underpins every transaction on the internet. There was only one problem: they couldn’t tell anyone about it.
Between them James Ellis, Clifford Cocks and Malcolm Williamson invented Public Key Cryptography, a system that permits secure communications and electronic transactions without the prior exchange of a secret key. Their work was used to secure Government communications – and naturally their bosses at the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) wanted to keep their discovery top secret.

Thus, the trio were practically written out of history when in 1976, Martin Hellman, Ralph Merkle and Whitfield Diffie from Stanford University began publishing similar theories in the US.
A year later, Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology developed the Stanford team’s theory even further and the RSA encryption algorithm, which secures billions of transactions on the internet every day, was born.

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Wiki Links: RSA , Clifford Cocks