ABSTRACT
For the last 20 years, Whitfield Diffie, Martin Hellman, and Ralph Merkle have been given credit as the cryptographers who discovered the technique of public-key cryptography, while Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman have been honored for developing RSA, the most integrated implementation of publickey cryptography. However, a recent announcement indicates that the history of cryptography has to be rewritten. According to the British government, public-key cryptography was originally invented at the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ ) in Cheltenham. It was in the late 1960s that a senior member of the military did some work in the field of nonsecret encryption, which is related to public-key cryptography without the inclusion of the concept of digital signature. There are some evidentiary artifacts available that could support these claims.
