In 1976, Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman introduced the idea that two strangers could agree on a secret key without meeting face to face. Their work earned them lasting recognition and, later, a Turing Award. But three years before that, James Ellis, a mathematician at GCHQ, had already figured out the same concept on his own in a classified memo that only British intelligence could see. Soon after, his colleague Clifford Cocks came up with the missing algorithm. GCHQ kept this discovery secret until 1997.
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Public key cryptography didn’t wait for the world to catch up. The world just wasn’t told it already had.
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